From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 16:15:37 -0500 From: Sam To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: Fwd: [9fans] Ad link In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <26029ec71211f29300ddd8b5225f1e38@coraid.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2b27e5bc-ead0-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 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? 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. 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