Distributed Storage Area Network Simulation Compared to True Performance

摘要

The demand for data storage over a large geographical area has placed stress on existing storage structures that was never envisioned in original networks. This has resulted in the emergence of new storage architectures designed to be reliable, fast and geographically distributed. One of the storage architectures is a distributed storage area network (DSAN). The geographically distributed architecture of a DSAN makes it complex to test in a laboratory environment without expensive laboratory hardware or a detailed computer simulation. The following paper examines results from a simulation, theoretical expectations, and laboratory experimentation of a DSAN. Minimal research has been conducted in the area of DSAN modeling, and so this paper is focusing on the problems that are created when a simulation created for storage area network implementation is used to model a DSAN.