Ken Fuchs wrote:
> On Thu, 26 May 2005, Florin Iucha wrote:
> 
>>Do you have any links/references/howto on using Fiber Channel? I was 
>>interested in the same thing, but I did not find any good references.
> 
> 
> Rather than using Fibre Channel (FC), one might consider ATA/SATA over
> Ethernet (AoE).  There's a good article on AoE in the June issue of
> Linux Magazine.  There's also a less technical article on AoE in the
> June issue of Linux Journal.
> 
> At least for new equipment, AoE network devices will be a about 1/10 the
> cost of FC devices.
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> Ken Fuchs <kfuchs at winternet.com>
> 

Crap, hit send button too soon.

Anyway, from what I've found ATA over Ethernet seems like a one horse
show, which raises my suspicions somewhat. More interesting to me is
iSCSI. I can see their arguments regarding the unnecessary additional
overhead required by wrapping a storage protocol in TCP/IP when the
disks are only 3 feet away, but it seems to me that it is simpler to
wrap something in TCP/IP than to figure out a new transport layer
without screwing it up.

There is a pretty good  Linux iSCSI target in development right now,
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=108475. I just
wish I had sparkier hardware to really test it out against.