net/aoe-vblade 14 NetBSD

ATA over Ethernet (AoE) delivers a simple, high performance, low cost alternative to iSCSI and FibreChannel for networked block storage by eliminating the processing overhead of TCP/IP.

• ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) is a thin protocol layer directly on top of Ethernet.

• ATA disk commands (ie. read disk sector x, write disk sector y) are put directly into standard Ethernet frames using the AoE protocol. AoE is a block storage protocol.

• AoE is a non-routed protocol, therefore does not require IP or TCP protocol layers. This eliminates unnecessary processing and makes network connection to disks simple. It also limits AoE to the local network segment.

The AoE protocol specification can be found at:

http://www.coraid.com/documents/AoEr8.txt