Transparent Reliable Multicast for Ethernet-Based Storage Area Networks

As disk storage density increases and data availability requirements become ever more demanding, data replication is increasingly an indispensable feature of enterprise-class storage systems. For highly available storage systems, every disk block is typically replicated on a local mirror server and a remote mirror server in addition to being stored on the main storage server. In a network storage environment, this N-way data replication increases the write traffic load on the storage client’s network interface by N times. Multicast is a natural solution to this problem. However, existing storage area network technologies such as Fibre Channel and Ethernet do not provide adequate support for linklayer multicast. This paper describes a novel reliable multicast mechanism for Ethernet-based storage area networks that effectively exploits the Virtual LAN technology and is able to keep the traffic load of N-way replication roughly at the same level as the no-replication case regardless ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: NCA
• Authors: Shibiao Lin, Maohua Lu, Tzi-cker Chiueh
• Keywords: NCA 2007, Network Computing, Network Storage, Storage Area Networks, Storage Systems