Multicast traffic in Storage Area Networks (SANs) enables applications such as disaster recovery, remote data replication and distributed multimedia systems, in which a server access concurrently multiple storage devices or, conversely, multiple servers access data on a single device. Thus, an asynchronous loss-less switching architecture devised for SANs is described, and its performance under multicast traffic is studied. Simulations are used to analyze switch performance under various traffic patterns and schedulers. Although most of the simulations refer to a specific switch architecture, performance results highlight interesting general trends in flow controlled asynchronous architectures. These architectures could be used effectively also in a more traditional data switching and routing scenario. In this case, multicast support becomes essential to support multimedia QoS aware applications and protocols heavily relying on the broadcast property of LANs.
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