6 research outputs found
Fibre Channel Switch Modeling at Fibre Channel-2 Level for Large Fabric Storage Area Network Simulations using OMNeT++
Get PDFAbstract—Typically, in the current enterprise data centers dedicated fabrics or networks are implemented to meet their LAN, Inter-Processor communication and storage traffic requirements. The storage traffic requirements of a group of servers are met through multiple storage area networks based on fibre channel, which has become the standard connection type. Typically, this fibre channel storage area networks are small (maximum of 32 switches/directors in a single fabric) and do not experience any scaling, stability and other performance issues.The advent of I/O consolidation in enterprise data centers for multiple traffic types to converge on to a single fabric or network (typically Ethernet platform) to reduce hardware, energy and management costs has also the potential to allow implementation of large storage area networks based on the fibre channel standards. Large storage area networks are being planned with more than two hundred switches/directors in a single fabric or network in addition to servers and storages connected to the fabric on Ethernet platforms. Even though these large storage area networks are envisioned to operate on Ethernet platform, they still have to satisfy the stringent operating and performance requirement set forth by the fibre channel standards. The two important issues of concern with large storage area networks are scaling and stability. The scaling and stability issues are dependent on the interactions and performance capabilities of various fabric servers located on each switch/director in the fabric in order to provide fabric services. In order to determine the extent of scaling and stability issues of a large fabric first the detailed models of the switch/director addressing the operations of the individual fabric servers are required. Next, the interactions of the switches/directors using the detailed models are to be simulated to study the scaling and stability issues.In this paper, the detailed modeling of the fibre channel switch and the fabric servers using the OMNeT++ discrete event simulator is presented first. Detailed models are developed addressing the behavior of the switch at the level-2 of the fibre channel protocol since this layer addresses the requirements and operations of various mandatory fabric services like fabric build, directory, login, nameserver, management, etc. Next, using the OMNET++ discrete event simulator large fabrics are simulated. The results from the simulation are compared against the test bed traffic and the accuracy is demonstrated. Also, results and analysis of multiple simulations with increasing fabric size are presented
Scalability of RAID systems
Get PDFRAID systems (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) have dominated backend
storage systems for more than two decades and have grown continuously in size
and complexity. Currently they face unprecedented challenges from data intensive
applications such as image processing, transaction processing and data warehousing.
As the size of RAID systems increases, designers are faced with both performance and
reliability challenges. These challenges include limited back-end network bandwidth,
physical interconnect failures, correlated disk failures and long disk reconstruction
time.
This thesis studies the scalability of RAID systems in terms of both performance
and reliability through simulation, using a discrete event driven simulator for RAID
systems (SIMRAID) developed as part of this project. SIMRAID incorporates two
benchmark workload generators, based on the SPC-1 and Iometer benchmark specifications.
Each component of SIMRAID is highly parameterised, enabling it to explore
a large design space. To improve the simulation speed, SIMRAID develops a set of
abstraction techniques to extract the behaviour of the interconnection protocol without
losing accuracy. Finally, to meet the technology trend toward heterogeneous storage
architectures, SIMRAID develops a framework that allows easy modelling of different
types of device and interconnection technique.
Simulation experiments were first carried out on performance aspects of scalability.
They were designed to answer two questions: (1) given a number of disks, which
factors affect back-end network bandwidth requirements; (2) given an interconnection
network, how many disks can be connected to the system. The results show that
the bandwidth requirement per disk is primarily determined by workload features and
stripe unit size (a smaller stripe unit size has better scalability than a larger one), with
cache size and RAID algorithm having very little effect on this value. The maximum
number of disks is limited, as would be expected, by the back-end network bandwidth.
Studies of reliability have led to three proposals to improve the reliability and scalability
of RAID systems. Firstly, a novel data layout called PCDSDF is proposed.
PCDSDF combines the advantages of orthogonal data layouts and parity declustering
data layouts, so that it can not only survivemultiple disk failures caused by physical interconnect
failures or correlated disk failures, but also has a good degraded and rebuild
performance. The generating process of PCDSDF is deterministic and time-efficient.
The number of stripes per rotation (namely the number of stripes to achieve rebuild workload balance) is small. Analysis shows that the PCDSDF data layout can significantly
improve the system reliability. Simulations performed on SIMRAID confirm
the good performance of PCDSDF, which is comparable to other parity declustering
data layouts, such as RELPR.
Secondly, a system architecture and rebuilding mechanism have been designed,
aimed at fast disk reconstruction. This architecture is based on parity declustering data
layouts and a disk-oriented reconstruction algorithm. It uses stripe groups instead of
stripes as the basic distribution unit so that it can make use of the sequential nature of
the rebuilding workload. The design space of system factors such as parity declustering
ratio, chunk size, private buffer size of surviving disks and free buffer size are explored
to provide guidelines for storage system design.
Thirdly, an efficient distributed hot spare allocation and assignment algorithm for
general parity declustering data layouts has been developed. This algorithm avoids
conflict problems in the process of assigning distributed spare space for the units on
the failed disk. Simulation results show that it effectively solves the write bottleneck
problem and, at the same time, there is only a small increase in the average response
time to user requests
