Re: Fwd: [9fans] Ad link

[Sam <sah@softcardsystems.com>]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Ronald G. Minnich wrote:
>
>> Actually I meant to say, 9fans only price. I'll also give really good
>> prices for the shelf with 10 blades as well.  We sell these for $2,495
>> but I'll sell one to 9fans folk at the `we don't make any money' price
>> of $1,500.
>
> These are just raw disks, or is there a file system on there that does
> snapshots?

<theskinny>

AoE is a really light protocol for wrapping ATA commands in
Ethernet frames.  The EtherDrive blade is a nanoserver
that sits on the network serving AoE and issuing ATA commands
to its attached disk.  The shelf provides a way for each blade
to get its power and physical ethernet port.

So you plug each EtherDrive into a switch, yourself into the
(same) switch, and you access the disks -- whether it's ten or
ten thousand.

</theskinny>

As an aside, since AoE is just a wrapper for the ATA commands,
you can take a disk out of a machine, put it on an ED blade,
and remount it over the network.

So to answer your question, from the client side a full
shelf looks like ten disks.

We're currently developing raid / volume management software
for plan 9 for our raidblade product.  It should be released
within the month.

Sam