SATA (and older PATA) hard drives use the Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) protocol to issue commands, such as read, write, and status.
By using an AoE driver, the host operating system is able to access a remote disk as if it were directly attached.
The encapsulation of ATA provided by AoE is simple and low-level, allowing the translation to happen either at high performance or inside a small, embedded device, or both.
Instead, AoE packets can only travel within a single local Ethernet storage area network (e.g., a set of computers connected to the same switch or in the same LAN Subnet or VLAN).
The protocol provides for AoE targets such as Coraid Storage appliances, vblade and GGAOED to establish access lists ("masks") allowing connections only from specific MAC addresses (although these can be spoofed).
Without this cooperation file-system corruption and data loss is likely, unless access is strictly read-only or a cluster file system is used.
One option provided by AoE is to use the storage device itself as the mechanism for determining specific host access.
In 2007, LayerWalker[10] announced AoE hardware called miniSAN[11] running at both Fast and Gigabit Ethernet.
The miniSAN product family offers standard AoE server functions plus other management features that targets PC, consumer and small and medium businesses markets.