Embedded exchange technology with increased reliability

The embedded storage switching technology enables the storage system to integrate 2 Gbps switching network connections within the storage array. Benefits of the embedded storage exchange technology include higher reliability, better performance, and the ability to add Hard Disks without degrading performance.

The shared bus architecture is applied to the backend of many storage systems, making each hard drive or tape drive in the storage array a single fault point. A drive failure significantly increases the risk of downtime of the entire disk array.

Whether or not Fiber Channel, iSCSI, or IP are used, the storage system controller shares the bus protocol with the original Fiber Channel Arbitration loop (FC-AL, translate requests sent from the frontend to the backend.

The arbitration and data flow of the vintage FC-AL loop must go through all the devices in the loop. Therefore, each device in this path increases the latency and, more importantly, the extra fault points. Vintage FC-AL loops run through a controller mechanism, where the Controller first arbitrates control of the loop and then sends commands to a hard drive that require the drive to receive data written to the hard disk or request data from a specific location.

The back-end switching technology uses the FC-AL protocol in exchange to assign a point-to-point connection to each disk drive.

If a vswitch uses the embedded storage and exchange technology, its chip will be integrated with key components of the switch kernel, embedded and string converter/string-parallel converter, 1G/2 Gbps bandwidth function and diagnostic function.

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The storage system physically installs multiple hard disks in a single chassis to form a so-called "Hard Disk group" (JBOD ). Prior to the emergence of a higher level of integration provided by the embedded storage switch, the installation of switching functions in JBOD is impractical for modular storage systems due to space, power supply, heat and price issues. When embedded storage swap is added to JBOD, it becomes an SBOD ).

Now, when an initiating device arbitrates control of the system, the arbitration process does not pass through all devices (such as in a shared bus architecture ), instead, it is transmitted only to the Switching Matrix and returned to the initiating device. This process is very fast, greatly reducing system latency. After the initiating device obtains control, it can open the target drive and start communication. Data packets sent between the initiator device and the drive are now transmitted point-to-point, and multiple conversations can occur simultaneously.

Whether the embedded backend switch provides connectivity from the Controller to multiple JBOD, or to a single hard drive using SBOD, the embedded switch achieves connection reliability, availability, and applicability.

Embedded exchange provides IT administrators with tools for automatic deployment maintenance, monitoring, and maintenance. Each port of the embedded storage switch can reset the Low-Level Signal Time To increase signal integrity and reduce system jitter.

IT administrators can develop policies at the highest level, which can be transferred to the lowest layer of the storage system, while backend embedded storage switches can execute these policies at the lowest layer. For example, a policy can be formulated to automatically delete a hard disk when a fault trend is detected (for example, the number of Cyclic Redundancy verification errors increases over a period of time.

The embedded storage exchange technology eliminates performance bottlenecks caused by the operation of shared infrastructure storage systems. Currently, all topology structures can benefit from a certain aspect of backend switching technology (in backend switching technology, performance will be based on Load Distribution (from video streams to Data Warehouse applications) ), more benefit from the low cost of ownership and automation of the storage system.

1. Topic: exchange technical configuration Manual