Implementation and Evaluation of iSCSI over RDMA

iSCSI is an emerging storage network technology that al-lows block-level access to storage devices, such as disk drives, over a computer network. Since iSCSI runs over the ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol, it has many advantages over its more proprietary alternatives. Due to the recent movement toward 10 gigabit Ethernet, storage vendors are interested to see the benefits this large increase in network bandwidth could bring to iSCSI. In order to make full use of the bandwidth provided by a 10 gigabit Ethernet link, specialized Remote Direct Memory Access hardware is being developed to offload processing and reduce the data-copy-overhead found in a standard TCP/IP network stack. This paper focuses on the development of an iSCSI implementation that is capa

Implementation and comparison of iSCSI over RDMA

iSCSI is an emerging storage network technology that allows for block-level access to disk drives over a computer network. Since iSCSI runs over the very ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol it has many advantages over its more proprietary alternatives. Due to the recent movement toward 10 gigabit Ethernet, storage vendors are interested to see how this large increase in network bandwidth could benefit the iSCSI protocol. In order to make full use of the bandwidth provided by a 10 gigabit Ethernet link, specialized Remote Direct Memory Access hardware is being developed to offload processing and reduce the data-copy-overhead found in a standard TCP/IP network stack. This thesis focuses on the development of an iSCSI implementation that is capable of supporting this new hardware and the evaluation of its performance. This thesis depicts the approach used to implement the iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access (iSER) with the UNH iSCSI reference implementation. This approach involves a three step process: moving UNH-iSCSI from the Linux kernel to the Linux user-space, adding support for the iSER extensions to our user-space iSCSI and finally moving everything back into the Linux kernel. In addition to a description of the implementation, results are given that demonstrate the performance of the completed iSER-assisted iSCSI implementation

Design and Implementation of the iWarp Protocol in Software

The term iWarp indicates a set of published protocol specifications that provide remote read and write access to user applications, without operating system intervention or intermediate data copies. The iWarp protocol provides for higher bandwidth and lower latency transfers over existing, widely deployed TCP/IP networks. While hardware implementations of iWarp are starting to emerge, there is a need for software implementations to enable offload on servers as a transition mechanism, for protocol testing, and for future protocol research