ATA-Over-Ethernet Has Better Throughput Than FC

CORAID, Inc., provider of SAN, has released the results of a performance comparison study of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) running in a VMware ESX environment. Using the Iometer benchmarking tool originally developed at Intel Corporation, I/O loads were generated for testing a single virtual machine using VMware ESX Server connected to a CORAID EtherDrive SAN storage array. For a 32 Kbyte I/O size, throughput with sequential reads was measured to be 234 Mbytes/sec for AoE as compared to 172 Mbytes/sec for Fibre Channel. The study also demonstrated that throughput with sequential writes was measured to be 234 Mbytes/sec for AoE compared to 123 Mbytes/sec for Fibre Channel.

    Single Virtual Machine Throughput, 100% sequential
    read (Maximum IOPS measured: 16,148)

"AoE is an open lightweight SAN protocol that leverages the advantages of Ethernet to transport ATA disk commands without the burden of TCP/IP overhead and easily outperforms Fibre Channel and iSCSI," said James Kemp, CEO of CORAID. "Running on AoE, our EtherDrive SAN leverages VMware virtualization to efficiently resolve the increased storage demands of virtualization. EtherDrive is providing customers with an affordably fast SAN that is reliable, scalable and easy to implement. At about $400/TB, EtherDrive SAN is also far more affordable that iSCSI and Fibre Channel." CORAID EtherDrive SAN products provide a complete solution for extreme performance storage area networks and offer best enterprise-class solutions that embrace virtualization for the demands of today’s IT organizations.

This performance comparison study builds on published results from VMware detailing the Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance. Using Iometer for load generation, tests were performed with a single virtual machine running on the VMware ESX Server 3.5 U3 configuration connected to a CORAID EtherDrive LD2461 AoE-based storage array. Results prove that AoE is substantially faster than Fibre Channel and iSCSI in testing both read and write throughput. AoE demonstrated better response times than either Fibre Channel or iSCSI.

To read the complete study