StarWind Software

so, it is my understanding that iscsi overhead is quite resource intensive...are there any plans to integrate your ATA over Ethernet initiator into starwind SAN, or NativeSan?
might be quite the performance gain

What you say was true in maybe 2003. But it's 2013 already. With multi-core and multi-GHz CPUs and TCP and iSCSI being hardware accelerated in the modern NIC ASICs you're not going to see any
difference in CPU utilization even under microscope.

From the other side AoE is a very crappy protocol by design and does very poor job in putting as much data into Ethernet frame as possible, it's not routable w/o TCP (and wrapping AoE inside
TCP would essentially mean iSCSI so why mess with something VERY few vendors support?) and it does perform extremely bad with re-transmission in case of a packet loss. Also add here no OS
talks ATA inside storage stack, everybody does iSCSI. So go commodity, don't listen to marketing bullshit and avoid lock-in inside single vendor.

There are plans to discontinue AoE initiator completely and finally let AoE R.I.P. once and forever.

P.S. I'm also VERY pessimistic about FCoE future outside of an ability to keep pure FC vendors floating on the surface of the water for some more years. StarWind is iSCSI company and we'll continue
to expose iSCSI as a core backbone protocol and file system services on top of it. Very cost effective and highly performing.

barrysmoke wrote:so, it is my understanding that iscsi overhead is quite resource intensive...are there any plans to integrate your ATA over Ethernet initiator into starwind SAN, or NativeSan?
might be quite the performance gain

good info, thanks!

NP