Coraid EtherDrive SAN Complies to ATA-Over-Ethernet Revision 11

CORAID, Inc. announced that the company’s EtherDrive SAN products adhere to the latest revision of the ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) protocol.

EtherDrive SR2421 24TB Storage Appliance

The new revision, AoE revision 11 was motivated by server virtualization and defines two top-level commands for fencing and reserve/release of an AoE target device. Fencing, a technique used in redundant storage configurations, allows an AoE target to control access based on MAC addresses. The reserve/release extension, an equivalent mechanism to the SCSI command utilized by the iSCSI storage protocol, provides an interface for access locking of an AoE target. These sharing features are needed for server virtualization environments.

AoE is an open lightweight SAN protocol. AoE, an elegantly simple protocol, leverages the advantages of Ethernet to transport ATA disk commands without the burden of TCP/IP overhead. "CORAID EtherDrive SAN products are built upon AoE technology," said James Kemp, CEO of CORAID. "Designed for simple, high-performance access of RAID storage devices over Ethernet networks, AoE gives the possibility to build SANs with low-cost, standard technologies."

Because AoE is an open protocol embraced by the open source community, a variety of AoE drivers and tools are available free of charge.

EtherDrive SAN provides fast storage area network solutions exceeding Fibre Channel speeds at Ethernet prices. Exploiting commodity components to deliver affordably fast SAN, EtherDrive is simple to understand and easy to use.