Hi Adi,
 
You've got me very interested in ATA-over-ethernet. Reading around 
online, it seems very simple! I have a couple of questions if you don't 
mind:
 
1) Can I export LVM volumes as block devices using ATAoE? Then, the 
"clients" (Xen nodes) can do their own LVM stuff with the exported 
"device"..
 
2) How would I use 802.3ad "link agregation" with ATAoE?
 
Thanks
 
Hi!
> Can you suggest a way I could benchmark all 
these things? I've never
> benchmarked Hard Drives before..
As 
mentioned in my previous mail -- use (for example) fio to do 
benchmarks. 
Before you start with benchmarking I suggest to read the 
following slides:
http://www.pgcon.org/2009/schedule/attachments/123_pg-benchmarking-2.pdf
There 
are many very clever hints in this document. Getting benchmarking
right is 
very hard and giving general statements about performance is
(close to) 
impossible... ;-)
Just one more thing: You cannot compare local benchmarks to 
benchmarks of
iSCSI/AoE targets. Devices connected to your local bus have a 
way lower
latency! This results in lower throughput mainly. RAID0 on local 
disks
gives way higher throughput in terms of MBps than network storage. 
Therefor
"IOPS" were invented... ;-)
Feel free to ask, if you need 
more specific hints on how to conduct
benchmarks... I have recently done some 
work in this area.
-- Adi