Two Emerging Serial Storage Interfacesfor Supporting Digital Libraries: Serial Storage Architecture(SSA) and Fiber Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL)

  • Authors:

  • David H. C. Du;Tai-Sheng Chang;Jenwei Hsieh;Sangyup Shim;Yuewei Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • Distributed Multimedia Research Center and Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CSci Building, 200 Union Street SE, Merriapolis, MN 55455, USA. du@cs.umn.edu;Distributed Multimedia Research Center and Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CSci Building, 200 Union Street SE, Merriapolis, MN 55455, USA. Tai-Sheng.Chang@med.ge.com;Distributed Multimedia Research Center and Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CSci Building, 200 Union Street SE, Merriapolis, MN 55455, USA Jenwei-Hsieh@dell.com;Distributed Multimedia Research Center and Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CSci Building, 200 Union Street SE, Merriapolis, MN 55455, USA. sishim@email.sjsu.edu;Distributed Multimedia Research Center and Computer Science Department, University of Minnesota, 4-192 EE/CSci Building, 200 Union Street SE, Merriapolis, MN 55455, USA. yuewei wang@hotmail.com

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Digital libraries require not only high storage space capacity but alsohigh performance storage systems which provide the fast accesses to the data.These requirements can not be efficiently supported with the traditional SCSIinterfaces. Several serial storage interfaces have been proposed forconstructingstorage systems with high transfer bandwidth, large storage capacity, andfault tolerance feature.Among them, Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) and Fibre Channel-ArbitratedLoop (FC-AL) are considered as the next generation storageinterfaces with broad industry support. Both technologies supportsimple cabling, long transmission distance, highdata bandwidth, large capacity, fault tolerance, and fair sharing oflink bandwidth. In this paper, a tutorial and a comparison of thesetwo technologies arepresented. The tutorial examines their interface specifications, transportprotocols, fairness algorithms, and capabilities of fault tolerance. Thecomparison focuses on their protocol overhead, flow control, fairnessalgorithms, and fault tolerance. The paper also summarizes the recentlyproposed Aaron Proposal which incorporates features from both SSA and FC-ALand targets at merging these two technologies.