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Storage Systems UNIT-IInd

The document discusses various components used in storage area networks (SANs): 1. Switches and directors route and direct storage traffic between servers, storage devices, and other network components. Directors are larger, modular switches designed to handle high volumes of storage I/O traffic. 2. High availability refers to systems designed for continuous operation through redundant components and failover capabilities. RAID and SANs improve storage availability. 3. Fibre Channel is a high-speed network technology that connects storage to servers and supports block storage protocols like SCSI and FICON. It uses switched fabric topologies. 4. Other components discussed include 1GbE/10GbE, Metro Ethernet for MANs

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40 views

Storage Systems UNIT-IInd

The document discusses various components used in storage area networks (SANs): 1. Switches and directors route and direct storage traffic between servers, storage devices, and other network components. Directors are larger, modular switches designed to handle high volumes of storage I/O traffic. 2. High availability refers to systems designed for continuous operation through redundant components and failover capabilities. RAID and SANs improve storage availability. 3. Fibre Channel is a high-speed network technology that connects storage to servers and supports block storage protocols like SCSI and FICON. It uses switched fabric topologies. 4. Other components discussed include 1GbE/10GbE, Metro Ethernet for MANs

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Elective IV(Storage Systems)

Unit II
Network Components:

1) Switches :- A switch is a device that connects servers and shared pools of storage


devices and is dedicated to moving storage traffic.
A SAN switch is often a Fibre Channel (FC) switch, which is compatible with the Fibre
Channel protocol. The FC switch checks the data packet header, determines the
computing devices of origin and destination, and sends the packet to the intended storage
system. An FC switch is designed for use in a high-performance network with
low latency and lossless data transmission.
A SAN switch can also be an Ethernet switch. The Ethernet-based SAN switch would
ideally be devoted to storage traffic in an Internet Protocol (IP) SAN to try to maintain
performance predictability. The Ethernet switch would view the iSCSI storage target as
an IP address and forward the storage traffic to the IP address.
( You Can Extend Switches Theory as per your requirement/ Marking
weightage)

2) Directors :-
i) A Fibre Channel (FC) director is a modular, chassis-based networking device that
provides connectivity between host servers, switches and storage systems in a
dedicated FC storage area network (SAN).
ii) An FC director switch is designed to handle heavy loads of storage I/O traffic,
facilitate lossless data transmission, and deliver high availability,
high bandwidth and low latency. Slots for FC line cards, modules and/or blades
allow for hundreds of ports to enable end users to build a larger and more resilient
SAN fabric than they could create with less expensive basic FC switches.
iii) A common architectural approach for an FC SAN is a core/edge design in which
the user deploys basic switches at the edge of the network and one or more large
FC director-class switches at the core. An FC director can eliminate the need for
many of the inter-switch links (ISLs) that are often used to connect multiple fixed-
port switches. The result is a less complex architecture, lower latency and eased
management due to fewer switches.
iv) FC director-class switches have redundant components such as control processors,
power supplies and cooling fans to eliminate the risk of a single point of failure.
Using an FC director, the user can generally replace problematic components and
update software and firmware without system downtime.
v) The major manufacturers of FC directors are Brocade Communications Systems
Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc.
vi) The director is typically able to pass information via Simple Network
Management Protocol (SNMP) to higher-level management software.
vii) An FC director is generally purchased through a server vendor, storage
vendor, systems integrator or value-added reseller (VAR).

3) Highly Available Systems- In information technology, high availability refers to


a system or component that is continuously operational for a desirably long length of
time. Availability can be measured relative to "100% operational" or "never failing."
High availability refers to systems that are durable and likely to operate continuously
without failure for a long time. The term implies that parts of a system have been fully
tested and, in many cases, that there are accommodations for failure in the form of
redundant components.

Since a computer system or a network consists of many parts in which all parts usually
need to be present in order for the whole to be operational, much planning for high
availability centers around backup and failover processing and data storage and access.
For storage, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is one approach. A more
recent approach is the storage area network (SAN).

4) Fibre Channel :- Fibre Channel, or FC, is a high-speed network technology providing


in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data, primarily used to connect computer data
storage to servers. Fibre Channel is mainly used in storage area networks (SAN) in
commercial data centers. Fibre Channel networks form a switched fabric because they
operate in unison as one big switch. Fibre Channel typically runs on optical fiber cables
within and between data centers, but can also run on copper cabling.
Most block storage runs over Fibre Channel Fabrics and supports many upper level
protocols. Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is a transport protocol that predominantly
transports SCSIcommands over Fibre Channel networks. Mainframe computers run
the FICON command set over Fibre Channel because of its high reliability and
throughput. Fibre Channel can be used to transport data from storage systems that use
solid-state flash memory storage medium by transporting NVMe protocol commands.
Topologies:
There are three major Fibre Channel topologies, describing how a number of ports are
connected together. A port in Fibre Channel terminology is any entity that actively
communicates over the network, not necessarily a hardware port. This port is usually
implemented in a device such as disk storage, a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) network
connection on a server or a Fibre Channel switch.
 Point-to-point (see FC-FS-3). Two devices are connected directly to each other. This is
the simplest topology, with limited connectivity.
 Arbitrated loop (see FC-AL-2). In this design, all devices are in a loop or ring, similar
to token ring networking. Adding or removing a device from the loop causes all activity
on the loop to be interrupted. The failure of one device causes a break in the ring. Fibre
Channel hubs exist to connect multiple devices together and may bypass failed ports. A
loop may also be made by cabling each port to the next in a ring.
 A minimal loop containing only two ports, while appearing to be similar to point-
to-point, differs considerably in terms of the protocol.
 Only one pair of ports can communicate concurrently on a loop.
 Maximum speed of 8GFC.
 Arbitrated Loop has been rarely used after 2010.
 Switched Fabric (see FC-SW-6). In this design, all devices are connected to Fibre
Channel switches, similar conceptually to modern Ethernet implementations. Advantages
of this topology over point-to-point or Arbitrated Loop include:
 The Fabric can scale to tens of thousands of ports.
 The switches manage the state of the Fabric, providing optimized paths via Fabric
Shortest Path First (FSPF) data routing protocol.
 The traffic between two ports flows through the switches and not through any
other ports like in Arbitrated Loop.
 Failure of a port is isolated to a link and should not affect operation of other ports.
 Multiple pairs of ports may communicate simultaneously in a Fabric.
5) 1GE/10GE :- (10 Gigabit Ethernet)

6) Metro-ethernet:-
Metro Ethernet is the use of Carrier Ethernet technology in metropolitan area
networks (MANs). Because it is typically a collective endeavor with numerous
financial contributors, Metro Ethernet offers cost-
effectiveness, reliability, scalability and bandwidth management superior to most
proprietary networks.
Metro Ethernet can connect business local area networks (LANs) and individual end
users to a wide area network (WAN) or to the Internet. Corporations, academic
institutions and government agencies in large cities can use Metro Ethernet to connect
branch campuses or offices to an intranet.
A typical Metro Ethernet system has a star network or mesh network topology with
individual routers or servers interconnected through cable or fiber optic media.
"Pure" Ethernet technology in the MAN environment is relatively inexpensive
compared with Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) or Multiprotocol Label
Switching (MPLS) systems of similar bandwidth. However, the latter technologies
can be applied to Metro Ethernet in urban areas willing to devote the necessary
financial resources to the task.

Benefits of Metro Ethernet

Metro Ethernet provides the following benefits:


 Flexibility—Supports a wide variety of services and transports.
 Reliability—Ethernet operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) performs path
discovery, detects and reports connection failures, and measures performance.
 Cost Effectiveness/Ease of Use—Networks are less complicated and easier to maintain
than WAN networks, which lowers equipment and ownership costs.
 Quality of Service (QoS)—Supports QoS features, such as: classification, marking,
policing, queuing, and scheduling.
 Scalability—Supports speeds from one Mbps to 10 Gbps. Customers can increase
bandwidth dynamically, and often without the need to purchase or install new equipment.
7) Aggregation:-( Combining multiple disks is the aggregation)

8) InfiniBand (abbreviated IB) is a computer-networking communications standard used


in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency.
It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used
as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as
an interconnect between storage systems.

The internal data flow system in most PCs and server systems is inflexible and relatively
slow. As the amount of data coming into and flowing between components in the
computer increases, the existing bus system becomes a bottleneck. Instead of sending
data in parallel (typically 32 bits at a time, but in some computers 64 bits) across
the backplane bus.

InfiniBand specifies a serial (bit-at-a-time) bus. Fewer pins and other electrical
connections are required, saving manufacturing cost and improving reliability. The serial
bus can carry multiple channels of data at the same time in a multiplexing signal.
InfiniBand also supports multiple memory areas, each of which can addressed by both
processors and storage devices.

InfiniBand uses Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), which enables an almost limitless
amount of device expansion.

With InfiniBand, data is transmitted in packets that together form a communication called
a message. A message can be a remote direct memory access (RDMA) read or write
operation, a channel send or receive message, a reversible transaction-based operation or
a multicast transmission. Like the channel model many mainframe users are familiar
with, all transmission begins or ends with a channel adapter. Each processor (your PC or
a data center server, for example) has what is called a host channel adapter (HCA) and
each peripheral device has a target channel adapter (TCA). These adapters can potentially
exchange information that ensures security or work with a given Quality of Service level.

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