ATA Over Ethernet Performance Blows Away FC and iSCSI at Better Price

Information storage demands for every manufacturer become bigger every year, and the info storage space expenses grow with them. Unfortunately, data storage arrays and storage area networks (SAN) turn out to be a bigger portion of the Information Technology budget each year as well. Companies who are looking for reduced cost, higher performance options to a traditional SAN now can take advantage of a reasonably new technology called ATA over Ethernet (AoE) to meet their needs at a fair cost.

External storage arrays are increasingly preferred because manufacturers can add disc drives and storage as required and make it available to all their application servers. Because disc drives have far more capacity just about every year, that implies the storage arrays get upgraded every few years as well. As well as storage arrays, quite a few companies are also upgrading servers because of the advent of multi-core processors, greater memory densities, and ten gigabit network connections.

There are three common SAN systems in use for the servers to join to the storage arrays at the block level, which are Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Servers additionally can link to storage at the file system level utilizing NFS or CIFS. These protocols are all complicated protocols that demand plenty of server processor chip cycles to operate, or dedicated host bus adapters (HBA). Also increasing the server expenses, FC and FCoE require advanced storage switches.

ATA over Ethernet (AoE) storage devices are able to supply far more storage capacity at greater storage access speeds and for a lower cost than Fibre Channel or iSCSI. Moreover, AoE has really low overhead so processor utilization is low and HBA adapters are inexpensive. The storage network is designed with regular Ethernet switches, and is inherently safe due to the fact it is local to the servers and storage arrays. The systems also scale to big volumes of storage much better than FC or iSCSI based storage arrays simply because there is no expensive and complicated interior control system required.

AoE storage systems have an advantage in quite a few deployment situations. Far better performance, more storage, and a reduced selling price is a good combination for the ATA over Ethernet storage systems.

Find out more about AoE storage and how to design a low cost SAN from Adcap Network Systems.