Modeling and Evaluation of Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks

Nowadays, the fast growth of data intensive applic ations has caused a change in the traditional storage model. The server-to-disk approach, traditionally implemented with SCSI buses, is being replaced with storage area networks (SANs), which enable storage to be externalized from servers, thus allow ing storage devices to be shared among multiple servers. SANs are a separate high-speed network for storage, isolated from the messaging network and optimized for the movement of data between servers and storage devices . Currently, most SANs are based on Fibre Channel, a technology that has become a standard. In this chapter we describe the modeling issues taken into account when designing a SAN simulator. This simulation tool is able to consider, among others, several interconnection topologies, both real-world I/O traces and synthetic I/O traffic, message paquetization, failures in links , different routing algorithms and switch architecture s, etc. Additionally, we apply the simulator to the analysis of the effect on SAN performance of several parameters like switch architecture and a variable number of faulty links in the network.