Version No.

Date

   Prepared by 

Significant Changes

    1.

    25/04/2009

       Krishna Kumar
       (NEC HCL ST)

Abbreviation

Description

AoE

ATA over Ethernet, a open storage protocol

ATA

Advance Technology Attachment

Targets

End Point of communication ( normally refers to server side )

Initiators

A host that requests access to storage device ( client end )

RHCS

Red Hat Clustering Suite

Heartbeat

A signal periodically sent out by a hardware component in order to inform another component that it is working normally

ISCSI

Internet Small Computer System Interface

SATA

Serial ATA, a newer version of ATA interface

GFS

Global File System, a cluster aware filesystem for Linux

SAN

Storage Area Networking

LVM

Logical Volume Manager

RAID

Redundant Array of Inexpensive disks

DRBD

Distributed Replicated Block Device

NBD

Network Block Device

ENBD

Enhanced Network Block Device

GNBD

Global Network Block Device

HA

High Availability, a clustering solution for Linux which provides reliability, availability and serviceability

FOSS

Free Open Source Software

DFS

Distributed File System for Windows

LVS

Linux Virtual Server

SN

URLS

1

http://nbd.sourceforge.net/

2

http://en.wikipedia.org/

3

http://3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9650.asp

4

http://www.drbd.org/

5

http://www.linux-ha.org/

6

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8149

7

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-5-manual/Cluster Administration/

SAN Features

Available Options On FOSS

Low Cost & Simplicity

AoE Protocol and corresponding softwares are available on FOSS.

Security

No routability provides inherent security

Speed of ATA disk

1) Typical 7200-rpm SATA disk drive: 105 MB/s (sustained throughput)

2) Typical 7200-rpm PATA disk drive: 72 MB/s (sustained throughput)

Speed of Ethernet

1) Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT): 125 MB/s

2)10-Gigabit Ethernet: 1,250 MB/s

Data Packets

AoE simply delivers 48 bytes and data ( only extra 48 bytes )

Full Virtualization Support

Fully Compatible with hypervisors such as Xen, VMware, Microsoft Virtual PC to virtualize computers that are used as servers

Virtualized disk

We can combine multiple 22 TB disk into a single RAID disk.

Device access through Internet

Remote access to an AoE device through the Internet can be achieved

through tunneling, we can use software to convert local packets into routable packets at both ends of a link.

Easy management of AoE Servers and nodes

AoE Tools like CEC provides a terminal interface for AoE device. All the clusters and nodes can also be managed by RHCS cluster manager

Connecting Multiple Disks

24 port SATA controller PCI express card having capacity >=2TB per disk

Theoretical limits of AoE devices

AoE has a limitation of 65535 major x 255 minor addresses, so you're
limited to approximately 16 million block devices on a single
broadcast domain / san. For each individual block device, the ATA
lba48 addressing restricts you to about 140 PetaBytes.

Diskless booting Support

Diskless booting (PXE booting) is available in AoE for windows as well as for Linux

Fencing

RHCS fencing daemon provide fencing against corresponding failover domains

Network Load balancing

RHCS lvs and piranha provides network load balancing

Proper Synchronization among all the nodes

RHCS GFS/GFS2 uses DLM to provide this feature

Block Level Redundancy

DRBD is a tool available on Foss to provide high availability in SAN in terms of block level. If DRBD is used with heartbeat and rhcs, it's a very good solution for HA in storage networking.

Directory level Redundancy

NFS fail over and auto mounting is easily handled by RHCS.

Resource Management and ensured communication among other nodes

CMAN of RHCS and Heartbeat are good solutions against this.