To do a good job in three aspects, the development of storage switches will surely go to the highway

Due to the cost, the development of fiber channel switches in the middle and low-end markets has never been ideal, which gives storage switches the opportunity. We also need to carefully consider the main factors that promote the development of storage switches. There have been some notable developments in the storage switch market recently, for example, the fiber channel Fabric routing technology, the multi-protocol storage switch, and the emergence of blade Hidden fiber channel switches that are important to the popularization of SAN. This article will analyze the generation and use of these new technologies and their impact on the development of storage switches for your reference.

Disaster Tolerance promotes SAN Routing

The storage network technology has brought many benefits to humans in its historical development process. However, the rapid development of network storage and disaster tolerance has also made people feel the limitations of traditional optical fiber channels. In general, a storage switch that is connected to each other forms a Fabric when a SAN network is formed by cascade of fiber channel switches. The limitations of traditional optical fiber channels are mainly manifested in the fact that data communication and resource sharing cannot be achieved between different Fabric. In a Fabric, the larger the SAN network is formed by the more fiber channel switches, the more opportunities for devices to access and migrate, resulting in more broadcast information for devices to access and migrate. Although this broadcast information is insignificant compared with the data broadcast storm in Ethernet, it cannot be ignored for the high availability level and network management required by the storage network.

Benefits of SAN

SAN integrates servers and storage, greatly improving the efficiency of storage devices and reducing the hardware investment cost of the system. SAN enables centralized management of the storage network, reduces the management cost of the storage network, and improves the management efficiency. SAN frees the LAN network from the pressure of backup and access, allowing the LAN to focus on business applications, greatly reducing the backup and recovery time. The high redundancy of SAN greatly improves the availability of the storage system. SAN provides the disaster recovery system with an ideal infrastructure featuring high redundancy and long-distance transmission. SAN is one of the key elements for achieving high-speed recovery of disaster recovery systems.

In various disaster recovery systems, once the local and remote SAN are connected, a large Fabric is formed. The long-distance bare fiber or IP connection between local and remote SAN is often the weakest link in this Fabric. On the premise that local and remote SAN belong to the same Fabric, long-distance connections between them fluctuate, and then Fabric reconfiguration will be induced ). This is an important cause of unstable disaster recovery systems. The Disaster Tolerance System is at a historical development stage from traditional two-point Disaster Tolerance to multi-data centers for mutual disaster tolerance and the provision of disaster tolerance as a service to multiple customers. The traditional isolated Fabric Structure of fiber channel can no longer meet the requirements of Multi-Point Disaster Tolerance and make disaster tolerance a service.

Today, there are already hundreds of thousands of SAN islands in the world. Users often need to integrate these SAN islands. If this integration is to synthesize a Fabric, the customer will face complicated operations such as adjusting the storage switch parameters and rewriting the system device files on some servers. In many cases, the customer cannot even arrange enough planned downtime to complete such system integration. Different functional departments in the company objectively need to have the space and freedom to develop their own department's storage network. They should not influence the storage network of other departments because of the expansion of certain department's SAN. If all servers and storage devices in the company are in the same Fabric, this is very difficult to implement.

Fiber Channel SAN Fabric Routing Technology (hereinafter referred to as SAN routing technology) came into being under such a historical condition. People can use the SAN routing technology to connect Fabric, which has no connection with each other so far, so that each Fabric can maintain its independence. SAN routing technology brings many benefits to network storage and disaster recovery systems.

Traditional fiber channel switches provide us with high performance, high availability, and high reliability. However, the high cost of renting bare optical fiber while connecting to a SAN remotely is an important factor hindering customers from investing in SAN. In this case, a FC-IP specially designed for long-distance Fiber Channel connections, both converting Fiber Channel frames into IP protocol, long-distance transmission on a cheap IP network, in addition, the method of switching back to the optical fiber channel protocol in different regions shows its value.

At present, FC-IP has been supported on brocade's SAN multi-protocol router. In brocade's SAN multi-protocol router, the combination of FC-IP and the preceding SAN routing technology forms a low-cost and high-availability network storage remote connection mode. At the same time, iSCSI was originally used as a storage network technology based on the IP network to replace the fiber channel, and has received great expectations from various aspects. After more than four years of practical tests, we have finally realized that iSCSI will be difficult to replace Fiber Channel in terms of performance and reliability. Currently, the best use of iSCSI is to use iSCSI to connect low-end servers to high-end fibre channel storage devices. This requirement promotes the development of iSCSI to fiber channel bridging. Brocade's SAN multi-protocol router is an example of a practical product. Any port of the brocade SAN multi-protocol router supports SAN routing, FC-IP, and iSCSI.

Blade promotes popularization of SAN 

Due to the cost, fiber channel switches have been difficult to enter the low-end server market. The emergence of blade servers represented by IBM BladeCenter brings new opportunities for storage switches to enter the low-end server market. Recently, IBM has adopted a 16-port blade built-in Fiber Channel Switch developed by brocade in its blade server. The combination of blade servers and blade fiber channel switches can save a lot of space and connect to the network, this greatly reduces system composition and maintenance costs, allowing customers to enjoy the high performance, high availability, and high scalability of Fiber Channel SAN at an acceptable low price. The emergence of blade Hidden fiber channel switches makes SAN a huge step towards popularization.

Conclusion

The emergence of SAN routing technology is an epoch in the network storage industry. Its emergence makes multi-point to multi-point Disaster Tolerance difficult to achieve in the past a reality. Its Applications greatly improve system connectivity, availability, and reliability. SAN routing technology also makes the seamless interconnection between Fabric a reality, which greatly simplifies the SAN design and the complexity of data migration in the SAN system.

The multi-protocol access to the storage switch organically introduces the IP technology into the storage network, further expanding SAN connectivity and reducing connection costs. The emergence of inner blade fiber channel switches has made the popularization of SAN a huge step forward.