US Patent 10108560 Ethernet-leveraged hyper-converged infrastructure

Systems and methods are provided for enabling extensibility of discrete components (e.g., memory, storage, cache (hardware- or software-based), network/fabric, capacity, etc.) within a hyper-converged infrastructure. In the context of extending the storage component, an external storage device is connected to a hyper-converged appliance (“node” or “host”) via an Ethernet-based host bus adapter (“HBA”). Utilizing ATA over Ethernet (“AoE”) as the communication protocol, storage drives within the external storage device appear as direct-attached storage to the hypervisor of the hyper-converged appliance, extending the pool of storage resources available for allocation by the hyper-visor.