FIBRE CHANNEL and IP SAN INTEGRATION(10)

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

4.0 Some Case Studies4.1 Experiment of 10 Gbps Transcontinental Data AccessAs part of the Supercomputing Conference 2002 demonstration of SAN extension over a multi-gigabit transcontinental network, [27] test results of an FC SAN interconnected with iFCP gateways over a 10 Gbps link from San Diego to Baltimore were presented. Figure 5 shows the configurations used for the experiment.FC SwitchIP Switch/Router IP SAN GWIP Switch/RouterFC SwitchIP SAN GWFigure 5 Schematic of Data Access for the SC'02 demonstration The Supercomputing ’02 experiment proves the operation of a network running FC over IP network, using iFCP gateways, between the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the SDSC booth in Baltimore. The experiment demonstrates that FC traffic, using iFCP gateways, runs over a 10 Gbps link in excess of 2,600 miles, with a round-trip latency of 70 to 90 milliseconds. Aggregate throughput was relatively constant at 717 MB/s, and read performance was slightly better than write performance. In addition to the IP/iFCP based demo [27], there was another experiment of FC traffic over FCIP using a 10 Gbps SONET link, configured between the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) booth and the SDSC booth at the SC’02 show.110