Coraid, creators of ATA-over-Ethernet (AoE), have released an AoE for Solaris/SPARC 7 or never. The driver is currently considered beta and the first release is v1.2. The binary driver and source are both available. The source is covered under its own license (no name) and is BSD-like in nature. Release notes are available and say the following with reguards to Solaris/X86 support:

– There’s no precompiled driver yet, nor have we tested or even compiled
the code on an x86 system. This is a bug rather than a feature; we just
don’t have the hardware available yet.

Will Coraid EtherDrive catch on in the Solaris world? I guess a better question is, for all the press and marketing, has Coraid and AoE caught on in the Linux world yet? I’ve bagged on AoE in the past, and I’ve decided not to do so again because I’m really glad that at least this option is available to those who want it and I think all of us in the Solaris world should be thankful that Coraid is extending itself to our platform. While I’m not personally an AoE fan, I really encourage people to check it out for themselves and consider whether or not EtherDrive might be a useful solution for you.