# AoE network options

## Circuitsoft

So, I want to serve the disks from one server up to another, and am looking for hardware to do so. The idea, at the moment, is to run vblade on the target, and an AoE initiator on the other box. This is for high-performance computing, though. Looking for fast network adapters, I've found that InfiniBand is cheaper than 10G ethernet. Can I run AoE over InfiniBand? Is there an InfiniBand storage protocol that Linux can act as a target for?

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## xming

InfiniBand isn't ethernet and AoE uses Ethernet frames, you could use iSCSI (ip instead of ethernet) with InfiniBand though.

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## Circuitsoft

Would that be DMA accelerated? How much CPU power would be taken by running several hundred MB/s of disk access via iSCSI across the InfiniBand link?

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## Circuitsoft

Also, can InifiniBand be run directly point-to-point without a switch?

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## Circuitsoft

Looks like the inexpensive QLogic adapters can't run point-to-point, so I'm now looking the Intel E10G42BT cards and AoE again. I've seen some references to unfixed problems with other Intel 10G Ethernet adapter under Linux, but I wonder if they may be problems with TCP offload rather than raw Ethernet.

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## xming

I don't know much about InfiniBand, but iSCSI has more overhead than AoE, IP is layer 3 and Ethernet is layer 2, advantage is that iSCSI can be used in routed network but it is also its disadvantage, it can escape your LAN so you need to take security measures (read firewalling, acl, ...).

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