[SLL] Rant: ATA-over-Ethernet 0x88a2

[Andrew Sweger]

On Thu, 5 May 2005, Glenn Stone wrote:

> The price point is actually pretty easy to figure out (gods, I'm grokking
> marketing?  Whoda thunkit?)... A firewire enclosure has a fair amount of
> smarts, but no real OS.  A network print server has to be a full-blown
> spooler, and probably has several processes running in it.  A
> network-attached drive enclosure basically only has to have the kernel
> running and just enough userland to configure it; once it's configured
> something not entirely unlike knfsd would handle the I/O.  So if the smarts
> is somewhere between a spooler and a firewire box, so must be the price, no?

But AoE doesn't have any smarts. It's ATA "packets" over Ethernet frames.
Layer 2. No kernel. Just a packet translator (sure, maybe a small embedded
programmable chip, but essentially an ASIC/PGA). Only enough buffer to
handle timing and collision on both sides of the translator.

And, as Linux has proven, price doesn't necessarily follow the smarts.
Associating price with a perception of smarts is all marketing smoke and
mirrors, not economics (which I won't pretend to actually understand).
Once someone tapes out a ASIC glue chip that goes between an Ethernet and
ATA chip and puts them on a small PCB with the right headers, the game is
over (or worse, a single chip with all three parts). With volume
production, they'll retail for less than $30 each. Of course, I am
assuming there is even anything resembling a market for Ethernet disk
drives. But I'd put a good chunk of money on that bet.

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.