can these enclosures be populated with SATA or SAS drives purchased elsewhere?
recently Dell has made custom size slots on their PE T710 servers on which you could only place drives purchased from Dell !
is there an opensource way of doing ATA over ethernet? Coraid seems to do some flashing on HBAs?
SAN HBA's http://www.coraid.com/products host_bus_adapters_hba?
are not they proprietary?
Best Answer
I have several Coraid boxes, working flawlessly for several years. They're Supermicro chasis and mainboards, very good quality. The Coraid 'magic' comes in a flash IDE module, containing a Plan9 OS and their AoE 'target' software. The 'initiator' has been for some years in Linux kernel, but usually it's better to compile your own module to get the latest one.
They don't seem to be doing any custom HD firmware, and do support any brand. Of course, now it's saner to recommend 'enterprise SATA' disks, that have better MTBF, bigger buffers and other goodies over 'cosumer SATA'. Or, you can say that it's consumer disks getting worse and not 'enterprise' ones getting better.
There are several implementations of AoE targets; but the basic reference code is single tasking and doesn't perform well with multiple hosts. Other ones are much better and compare favorably with iSCSI targets. In the Xen user's list some users have reported great performance and scaling well to 10GE.