ATA over Ethernet
There are all kinds of ways to share storage on a network. AoE is one of them.
AoE couldn’t be easier to set up.
On the machine that will export a partition or hard drive, install vbladed. I installed it on my knoppmyth box here, as root:
$ apt-get install vblade
Then fire it up on that machine, I export /dev/sda3 on eth0, as slot 0/shelf 0:
$ vbladed 0 0 eth0 /dev/sda3
Then on the client machine install aoetools. I just used my Gutsy laptop:
$ sudo apt-get install aoetools
Then discover, print out the drive details and mount the drive:
$ sudo mkdir /mnt/aoe
$ sudo aoe-discover
$ sudo aoe-stat
e0.0 244.249GB eth1 up
$ sudo mount /dev/etherd/e0.0 /mnt/aoe/
Now, let’s watch some tv using ATA commands over Ethernet frames:
This gives us pretty cool low cost alternatives for SAN set ups.
How would you compare the performance and behavior of AoE to NFS, samba, sshfs, etc? Please give your reply in the form of interpretive dance.
Hey Bob,
/me begins to whirl dervishly about the room, all the while clucking and patting his rump.
On a more serious note…
That’s a good question and one I haven’t explored too deeply yet. I did some informal ‘time’ tests and it’s not compelling.
Using AoE:
npowell@delilah:~$ time mv /mnt/aoe/nathan/ubuntu-7.10-server-i386.iso .
real 8m4.496s
user 0m0.088s
sys 0m3.848s
Using sshfs:
npowell@delilah:~$ time sudo mv /mnt/sshfs/nathan/ubuntu-7.10-server-i386.iso .
real 4m15.202s
user 0m0.048s
sys 0m2.424s
Now, these are far from being an exact science. I was actually using my laptop for other tasks while this was going on as well as surfing the nets, etc. So take what you will from that. But sshfs was faster by half.
I am going to look around later today and see if this was an anomaly or about right.
Um, I have no idea what you are talking about, but is that Alton Brown? I’ve seen that ep… Grilled CHeese??
E, indeed it is. Alton is the man!