SANSim - A Platform for Simulation and Design of a Storage Area Network

Modeling and simulation are flexible and effective tools to design and evaluate the performance of Storage Area Network (SAN). Fibre Channel (FC) is presently the dominant protocol used in SAN. In this paper, we present a new simulation SANSim, developed for modeling and analyzing FC storage network. SANSim includes four main modules: an I/O workload module, a host module, a storage network module, and a storage system module. SANSim has been validated by comparing the simulation results with the actual I/O performance of a FC RAM disk connected to a FC network. The simulated results match the experimental readings within 3%. As an example of applicability, SANSim has been used to study the impact of link failures on the performance of a FC network with a core/edge topology.

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