Comment Not so much cheaper (Score 2, Insightful) 235
Ok, so the Coraid people are selling their ATA over Ethernet 15 slot version for $3,995.00. That's apparently around EUR 3133. I can get something proven iSCSI based from Promise here in Germany for 4.499,- (a Promise M500i). Ok, that is almost 50 percent more expensive, but the iSCSI solution is supposed to work under all operating systems (Linux, *BSD, Windows, etc.) more or less out of the box, while for AoE you will have to buy drivers for Windows, and has generally worse support for other operating systems.
Now, suppose you will really use this baby and you want to have *lots* of storage.
So you buy 15 SATA drives, like say Seagate ST3750640NS for EUR 444 each. Now the difference between AoE and iSCSI becomes less:
AoE solution: EUR 9793
iSCSI solution: EUR 11159
Now the iSCSI solution is only 14 % more expensive.
Now it would be clear for me to go for the "safe" path of something proven and widely supported like iSCSI instead of AoE. The infrastructe you need will be the same anyway (Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit ethernet switch).
Now, suppose you will really use this baby and you want to have *lots* of storage.
So you buy 15 SATA drives, like say Seagate ST3750640NS for EUR 444 each. Now the difference between AoE and iSCSI becomes less:
AoE solution: EUR 9793
iSCSI solution: EUR 11159
Now the iSCSI solution is only 14 % more expensive.
Now it would be clear for me to go for the "safe" path of something proven and widely supported like iSCSI instead of AoE. The infrastructe you need will be the same anyway (Gigabit Ethernet, Gigabit ethernet switch).
