Design of high performance storage area networks.

摘要

Storage area networks (SAN) are an emerging data communications technology that allows the interconnection of servers an storage devices in order to create a storage pool for users. A SAN is a separate high-speed network optimized for the exchange of data between servers and storage devices. SANs eliminate the bandwidth bottlenecks and scalability limitations present in traditional bus-based I/O architectures. This networking approach reports benefits when building medium and large-sized configurations such as high performance, topological flexibility, fault tolerance, high availability, and remote management.; The work presented in this Ph.D. is a contribution to the design of high-speed storage area networks, focusing on the interconnection network that connects serves and storage devices. In particular, this work analyses the effect of several factors on SANs performance. First, the main features related to the switch architecture to be used in a SAN environment are identified and evaluated. Second, different network topologies have been analyzed in both building and departmental environments. This analysis has included a study of the scalability properties of the networks used in building. Also, the performance degradation of the interconnection network due to link failures has been studied in these two contexts. Finally, several policies for dealing with the short control messages present in the network have been proposed in order to improve the overall performance.