On the Interconnection Topology for Storage Area Networks
IPDPS '01 Proceedings of the 15th International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium
Euro-Par '01 Proceedings of the 7th International Euro-Par Conference Manchester on Parallel Processing
DFTS: a novel distributed high fault-tolerance storage mechanism
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International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology
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Storage Area Networks (SANs) are an emerging data communications platform, which interconnects servers an storage devices (such as disks, disk arrays, and tape drives) to create a pool of storage that users can access directly. SANs eliminate the bandwidth bottlenecks and scalability limitations imposed by previous SCSI bus-based architectures and LAN connections between servers and the stored data. This networking approach reports benefits such as computer clustering, topological flexibility, fault tolerance, high availability, and remote management. The prominent technology for implementing SANs is Fibre Channel, due to the suitability of this technology for storage networking. Recently, other technologies for high performance interconnects have been developed. These interconnects provide switch-based networks with links transferring data at more than 1 Gigabit per second, being mainly used in the LAN environments. In this paper we analyze whether these high-speed LAN technologies could also be an interesting alternative to storage networking. We perform this analysis using real-world I/O traces. The main conclusion from our study is that most of the messages present the base network latency, meaning that the network is not heavily loaded. Moreover, response time is, in general, acceptable, being dominated by the time disks need to process the requests.