Small Tree Communications on Monday announced the addition of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE) storage products to its portfolio; the company is aiming the new products at the Small to Medium Business (SMB) market. AoE enables businesses to create Storage Area Networks (SANs) using low-cost peripherals rather than expensive servers; it’s positioned as an alternative to iSCSI.
Small Tree has partnered with 2 Degrees Frost Data Solutions to offer ATA over Ethernet for its customers; 2 Degrees Frost’s products are already available to the Linux market. The Small Tree offerings include their own Gigabit Ethernet cards, Foundry Gigabit Ethernet switches and EtherDrive AoE storage appliances from Coraid.
The hardware/software bundles from Small Tree include a four-drive rack-mountable system, 8-drive and 15-drive desktop systems, and 8-drive and 15-drive rack mountable systems. Prices for the hardware depend on capacity and configuration, and run from $3,587 for a 1 terabyte (TB) system to $10,799 for a 6TB system. The driver software costs $199 per work station and $399 per server.