The vblade is the virtual EtherDrive (R) blade, a program that makes a
seekable file available over an ethernet local area network (LAN) via
the ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol.

The seekable file is typically a block device like /dev/md0 but even
regular files will work.  Sparse files can be especially convenient.
When vblade exports the block storage over AoE it becomes a storage
target.  Another host on the same LAN can access the storage if it has
a compatible aoe kernel driver.

WWW: http://aoetools.sourceforge.net/