@jjjjkemp here, another newbie, mostly retired, from Southern California.

The OpenAoE Project is a great idea, and the inventor of the protocol is involved to supporting the project. Nice work Yacine.

I have known Brantley Coile for almost 30 years. He is a most uniquely insightful and talented software engineer. Characterizing him as "evil" is grossly unfair and untrue. The AoE protocol has a proven record of reliability with more than 10 years of data storage usage. It is simpler, faster and less expensive than Fiber Channel or iSCSI.

Brantley Coile, the founder of Coraid, invented the AoE storage protocol as a simpler way to build a SAN with common Ethernet. The AoE storage protocol was published and available for use free of charge in 2004. The AoE driver was given to the Linux kernel in 2005, and a free target implementation was also made available free (vblade). Coraid launched it's EtherDrive Storage Appliance product line focused at the Linux storage market. The company grew and enhanced it's simple storage appliance product line. AoE is the reason the appliance's were so simple, and fast, and reliable. Coraid grew from nothing for 5 years, then sought VC funding in 2009 to address a larger market. Upon closing the Series A round, VC's took control of the company, and its management. The founders (Brantley Coile, and others) were no longer calling the shots or setting the direction of product development. Many poor decisions were made, and millions of dollars wasted. The Coraid sales force fell in love with ZFS and Solaris and ignored the EtherDrive SRX appliances. Coraid started reselling Oracle/Solaris licensed servers, while engaging in a desperate attempt to get Open Solaris to a supportable product. They put all resources into this plan, but did not have the engineering team to execute the plan.

On April 15, 2015, Coraid Inc. was foreclosed, and all assets and intellectual property became the property of the primary debt holder. On May 8, 2015, the intellectual property, copyrights and trademark for EtherDrive SRX and VSX storage appliances were purchased by The Brantley Coile Company. The Brantley Coile Company announced that the software for SRX and VSX are now open source and available from the website www.etherdrive.com. Supported software licenses are also available and development of AoE products will continue.

@jjjjkemp here, another newbie, mostly retired, from Southern California.

@mlnews With the foreclosure of Coraid Inc., EtherDrive users can now build these storage appliances at a small fraction of the cost by installing the software in a SuperMicro multi-disk server. Seehttp://www.etherdrive.com
Build a petabye of simple, scalable, fast storage for less than $75,000.

@scottalanmiller Were you a customer of Coraid? If so when did you buy? Did you deal directly with Coraid or thru a reseller?