Storage Area Networking (SAN)

Analysis of SAN transport mechanisms: Due to the increasing need of data storage in addition to the amount of processing needed in the SAN entities, the usage of IP based transport mechanisms are perceived as not capable of handling the increasing demand. RDMA is the new protocol introduced to overcome the issues related with TCP/IP protocols for storage needs. With the usage of RDMA, work is in progress to evaluate and analyze the tradeoffs involved in the usage of different storage transfer processes. The transport mechanisms that are considered include: Network File System (NFS) over RDMA is an implementation of NFS over the RDMA protocol, SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) is another implementation of SCSI over a network (similar to iSCSI but based on RDMA), Socket Direct Protocol (SDP) is an implementation of AF_INET sockets over an RDMA transport, the usage of iSCSI over RDMA (based on iSCSI Extensions to RDMA or iSER) is another transport mechanism that is being actively pursued as a high performance replacement for iSCSI.