Optical Network-based storage application platform

Preface

Stored programs are mainly stored in the host and enterprise-level storage devices. If these storage applications are moved to the Storage Area Network SAN, this will greatly reduce the overall storage management costs for enterprises. This article explores the requirements of the optical network storage application for the hardware platform and a variety of available architectures.

The storage application based on the optical network has obvious management advantages, and its operating platform can present superior performance, availability and cost advantages. The first generation of storage application platform devices are mainly based on the general-purpose calculator technology. Emerging storage application platforms such as smart SAN switches and ctor products are based on technologies specifically created for them. This article compares various platforms and their related architecture options, and explains why vswitches are the best practice.

Requirements for optical network-based storage applications

Are Fortune 1000 enterprises facing the same challenges? D? D. The demand for storage is increasing, but the IT budget is not increasing or even decreasing. The solution to this challenge is the new technology that needs to significantly reduce storage management costs, which is the main part of the total cost of storage ownership ).

An effective method to reduce management load is to transfer a level-1 storage application that is currently stored on a host or enterprise storage device to a SAN optical fiber network.

These optical network applications reduce management costs through a variety of cost-saving methods: for example, to remove storage applications such as volume management from the storage subsystem, you can use fewer resources under the same management policy to merge and manage various storage devices. Without being limited by a single storage subsystem, the volume management application can supply more data from the entire storage resource cluster to all connected host systems. Fiber Network-based applications can also extract storage resources from high-end, medium, JBOD, and tape storage subsystems of different system vendors. In addition, a centralized management plan allows other data management applications, such as pull point dump, migration, and replication, in these heterogeneous storage subsystems. These benefits allow IT managers to save a lot of management costs.

Storage application platform requirements

Because these applications operate outside the host and enterprise-level array environments, a brand new storage application platform must be considered. To achieve higher efficiency, these platforms must meet the following requirements:

Cable speed performance: the application processing platform cannot reduce any performance, which is important at 01:10. In other words, the input/output IOPS per second, throughput, and wait time cannot be changed no matter whether the application is active or inactive.

Scalability: This system must support simple SAN and the largest enterprise-level SAN, and manage the storage data that is measured in Petabytes. In either case, multiple systems must appear in the form of one system.

Supports a wide range of applications: these platforms must support a variety of applications, from independent software vendor products to OEM subsystem vendor storage applications.

Architecture of the storage application platform (I)

Currently, many platforms that have been launched or are being designed meet the above requirements. These platforms can be divided into two categories:

The first type of application platform is based on general-purpose technologies, such as servers, network service platforms, and routers. Because these are easy to implement, the first wave of products are mainly devices. Although these products successfully save management costs, they all fall short of the above standards in terms of performance and scalability, mainly because most first-generation systems use general-purpose components. Usually PCI-X bus management costs, operating system management costs and low efficiency of HBA storage forwarding have a significant impact on performance and wait time. These systems cannot expand more than a few ports. In addition, the first generation system is closely integrated with a single application, so it cannot handle a wide range of applications.

The following figure shows the structure of a SAN and storage application device. Assume that each IOPS of the 50 hosts is 20 KB and a bidirectional path, the SAN requires 50 devices. In addition, this architecture requires 16 16 port edge switches for connection.

The second type of platform is the control of storage applications by the switch platform based on the SAN Switch or director, which is currently combined with specially constructed technologies. These devices are combined with many new technologies, so they can better meet the above requirements. These innovative initiatives include:

Specially built components

Control path/data path application separate distributed application processing)

Integrated exchange

The following is the structure of a SAN and storage application ctor. Based on the above assumptions, it only needs to use 2 64 ctor with 64 ports.

Architecture of the storage application platform (I)

Specially built components

Vswitch-based platforms can now use the next generation, Using Fiber Channel HBA, specially built storage processors, rather than general-purpose central processors. These storage processors are powerful devices that support data stream transmission in the storage network-This greatly reduces the wait time and limits it to 10 microseconds.

Control path/data path application

Separation

Most storage applications perform two types of operations. The first type is used to control incoming SCSI data, and then sends the data according to some table searches. This type of operation requires high performance. Relatively speaking, the second type of operation has low performance requirements, but it is very complicated, including Exception Handling, error, failure, and complex operations.

The first type of operation is very vulnerable to hardware acceleration in the above storage processor. By separating the control path from the data path, the vswitch-based platform can accelerate the storage application to an unprecedented level. This ensures that the operation of the cable speed is 10-40 K per port, the speed is 200 MB per port per second ).

Another advantage that applications send by controlling the path/data path component is scalability and availability. Multiple data path units can be sent through one or more exchange platforms, and one or more control paths are usually a cluster.) units can control data path units, this allows a small SAN to be extended to the largest SAN, but also a single application. The data path and control path do not have any invalidation points, so the availability is greatly improved. The system structure separation of the control path and data path does not exist in the device mode.

Integrated exchange

Integrated exchange brings three benefits to users:

Cost reduction-in a device-based SAN, an independent switch is still required for connection, because a device that does not pass through a switch may not be locked by an appropriate host or target. Integrated exchange reduces a lot of costs for the entire solution. The following analysis uses relative prices as an example, which is not used to predict the actual price. With the above configuration, the hardware cost for serving 50 hosts/1 m iops is about $0.4 million. Assume that each switch port is $1,000, and each device is $3,000 ), if a vswitch and director are used, the cost is only USD 0.3 million. Assume that the port of each smart switch or director is USD 3,000 ).

Easy manageability-the benefit of fewer devices is that SAN's manageability is simplified. In addition, application processing in a vswitch can use the virtual N-port technology to provide a large number of port addresses. On the contrary, a device can only provide addresses with the same number of actual ports. The advantage of providing a large number of addresses is that it simplifies manageability through clear tracking and partitioning.

Increase availability-reducing the number of devices while reducing the possibility of failures.

Benefits of switching architecture

Obviously, the aforementioned architecture innovations based on the vswitch platform can meet the requirements of the storage application platform.

Cable speed performance

By using a specially designed storage processor and the separation and processing mechanism of the data path/control channel, the storage applications on the vswitch-based platform will operate at a cable speed. In other words, the host speed will not decrease because applications are stored in the optical fiber network.

In addition to simple IOPS and wait time considerations, the advanced features of other data paths are also greatly improved by the switch integration architecture. These features include data transmission speeds that are too byte per hour, backup) and write IOPS pumping point dumping, copying ).

Scalability

Combining the distributed architecture and integrated exchange will enable flexible scalability of applications, from a very small number of ports to a large number of ports. During the expansion process, applications maintain consistency in providing centralized control and distributed data/path processing capabilities.

In addition, the scalability is also enhanced because of the higher availability and manageability.

Powerful Application Support

The control path/data path separation mechanism provided by the exchange platform is critical to supporting multiple applications. The data path function, especially the application in hardware, is used in the Application Programming Interface API ). The industry trend is to standardize APIs. A standardized API can enable software vendors, from large storage OEMs to emerging vendors, to apply their software to platform-based switches. The performance of each application can match its needs.

Conclusion

Fortune 1000 enterprises re-allocate some storage management functions covering enterprises to simplify management and integrate heterogeneous storage, these features include volume management, data migration from an independent host or storage subsystem, and replication to a new generation of application storage network devices. By integrating these functions in an optical network, IT managers can greatly simplify enterprise storage management tasks and improve network performance and scalability. These benefits will drive optical network storage management to become the mainstream in the next few years.