[Scottish] Testing AoE gear

[Phillip Bennett]

Hi everyone,

A while ago I was talking about upgrading some storage and RAID and such... 
I've been looking into the Coraid AoE solution (www.coraid.com) and have 
managed to get a test unit so I can evaluate it for a couple of weeks.  It's 
the 1521.

What I wanted to know was, does anyone have any guidelines for testing?  I'm 
sure I could think of some tests for this box, but if people have any ideas 
or scripts to test bandwidth, latency and speed etc, that would be a huge 
help!

And before it's too late and I splurge on one, does anyone have any 
experiences or commments about Coraid and their ATA over Ethernet boxes? 
I'd hate to buy one if they're not as good as they could be.

This box will have two possible uses.  The first is as primary backup 
instead of tape (Basically running a full backup to both tape and disk 
weely, then running incrimentals every day to disk) or possibly to upgrade 
from our 2x PowerVault 220S.  The PV220S isn't sold anymore, so we'd either 
have to do this, or move to the MD1000 from Dell.  Both use SATA disks, but 
the Dell uses a SCSI interface to the server where the Coraid uses AoE. 
Personally, I don't see a huge difference, apart from the fact that I could 
turn the AoE into a SAN and mount GFS partitions from various servers for 
faster (concurrent) access.  Would anyone see a problem with a setup like 
that?  Or have I got the wrong idea?

Thanks in advance,
Phillip.