Design and research on a multi-protocol RAID
Canhao Pei, Dongjian Luo, Chengfeng Zhang, Wei Wu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2008
With the rapid development of massive storages, traditional RAID of single-protocol is increasingly unable to satisfy the various demands of users. For the purpose of keeping down the investment of storages, we propose a multi-protocol RAID that utilizes existing storage devices. The multi-protocol RAID achieves the integration of storage via managing the disks of different interfaces. This paper presents a framework of multi-protocol RAID and a prototype implementation of it, i.e., the proposed multi-protocol approach can not only unify the storage devices of different types, but also provide different access channels (e.g. iSCSI, FC) to manage the heterogeneous RAID system, thus achieving the goal of centralized management. Our function tests validate the feasibility and flexibility of the proposed RAID system. The comparison tests indicate that the multi-protocol RAID can attain even higher performance than that of the single-protocol RAID, especially the aggregated bandwidth.