[matja]

There was a line of products called EtherDrive made by Coraid in the early 2000's that was basically a SATA to ATAoE bridge on the most basic devices, up to rack-mount solutions that used a Linux OS and Dell HBA to run vblade (https://github.com/OpenAoE/vblade) to expose a Linux MD array carved up using LVM2.

ATAoE ("aoe" in the Linux kernel) is nice because it is very lightweight in both terms of code to implement it (~2-3kloc, basically just stuff an ATA packet in an ethernet frame), low network overhead, and ease to setup (no IP addresses).