2Degrees Frost Data Solutions on Tuesday introduced ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage technology that’s Mac OS X-compatible. The systems are priced from $3,587 to $14,449 depending on capacity and features.
2Degrees Frost’s AoE — developed by Coraid — offers an alternative to iSCSI and Fibre Channel RAID arrays, but offers support for RAID Level 0, 1, 5 and 10 configured storage systems, with hot-swappable disks and support for Serial ATA (SATA)-I and SATA-II disk modules.
Small 1U rack-mount EtherDrive systems start at $3,578 for 1 terabyte (TB) of storage over four hard disk drive mechanisms. The highest-end EtherDrive, a desktop storage bundle configured with 11.25TB of total storage capacity spread over 15 disk drive mechanisms, costs $14,449.
The Coraid EtherDrive systems utilize a non-routable protocol designed to transport disk commands over a standard Ethernet connection. Coraid specializes in Linux-based storage technology; 2Degrees Frost has developed Mac OS X drivers for the EtherDrive hardware.
The 2Degrees Frost software is a Universal binary that runs natively on Intel and PowerPC-based Macs.