Performance analysis of an iSCSI-based unified storage network

In this paper, we introduced a novel storage architecture “Unified Storage Network”, which merges NAC (Network Attached Channel) and SAN (Storage Area Network), and provides the file I/O services as NAS devices and provides the block I/O services as SAN. To overcome the drawbacks from FC, we employ iSCSI to implement the USN (Unified Storage Network). To evaluate whether iSCSI is more suitable for implementing the USN, we analyze iSCSI protocol and compare it with FC protocol from several components of a network protocol which impact the performance of the network. From the analysis and comparison, we can conclude that the iSCSI is more suitable for implementing the storage network than the FC under condition of the wide-area network. At last, we designed two groups of experiments carefully.