FIBRE CHANNEL and IP SAN INTEGRATION

The maturity and mission-critical deployment of Fibre Channel (FC) in storage area networks (SANs) creates a unique class of multi-terabit networks with demanding throughput, latency, scalability, robustness, and availability requirements. This paper revie

FIBRE CHANNEL and IP SAN INTEGRATIONHenry Yang McDATA Corporation 4 McDATA Parkway, Broomfield, CO 80021, Tel: +1-720-558-4418 e-mail: Henry.yang@ Abstract The maturity and mission-critical deployment of Fibre Channel (FC) in storage area networks (SANs) creates a unique class of multi-terabit networks with demanding throughput, latency, scalability, robustness, and availability requirements. This paper reviews the state of and critical system-level requirements for SANs. It describes how Internet SCSI (iSCSI), FC over IP (FCIP), and Internet FC Protocol (iFCP) integrate with FC SANs and discusses associated benefits and challenges. Finally, the paper examines case studies in performance and protocol tuning in high-speed, long-delay networks, which are increasingly critical for FC-to-IP integration opportunities and challenges. 1.0 Introduction Information technology (IT) is a key driver and challenge for businesses, government, and research/development centers. Data centers are a critical asset and provide the infrastructure that houses information processing, storage, and communication resources. Corporations are under tremendous pressure to manage return on investment, massive growth in information processing and storage needs at a global scale, management, performance, availability, and scalability requirements, and the IT infrastructure. To add to the challenges, there are many new technology and deployment decisions that have significant implications in terms of value and impact to the data center. SANs are a critical part of the data center, and are based on high speed, high bandwidth, low latency, and low error rate interconnects for scaling application, database, file, and storage services. FC is the key technology and standard that drive rapid growth of SAN deployment. The development of global and distributed file systems, content-addressable storage, object-oriented storage, cluster and blade servers, and utility computing is driving more integrated IP and FC network usage. The evolution of the data center and new information and computing trends drives the data center toward a more dynamic resource and performance provisioning and management model, which demands more efficient and scalable computing, information storage, and networking. In addition, business and operational requirements in the data center drive the scaling and evolution of larger SANs encompassing metropolitan and wide-area distances, high security and availability, and multi-protocol networks. In the face of these trends, ease of use, configuration, and management of the SAN is even more important. This paper reviews important requirements and deployment examples. It describes emerging IP SAN technologies and how these technologies interface and integrate with101