A fibre channel RAID supporting multiple protocol disk interfaces
Ruifang Liu, Changsheng M. Xie, Xiaoming Dong · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
The paper describes a kind of fibre channel RAID that support multiple protocol disk interfaces. It can manage many kinds of disk storage devices with different physical interfaces in the same time, and it can bind different kinds of disks in one logical RAID group. The interfaces can be parallel SCSI, SATA, FC, SAS, iSCSI and etc. So it can help to consolidate enterprise storage, and reduce storage management cost. The fibre channel RAID comprises of SCSI target, SCSI initiator, RAID kernel and management modules. It implements target-mode fibre channel protocol that decides the host interface type of RAID in SCSI target module. The SCSI initiator module includes SCSI initiator mid-layer(SIML), SCSI front-end initiator drivers(FEIDs). There are many kinds of disk interfaces, but the disk devices using different protocol can understand the same block level access protocol such as the traditional parallel SCSI. So we encapsulate all the common processing operations of SCSI commands and responses in one SIML. And we implement specific SCSI transport protocol in one FEID, which supports a specified kind of disk interface. In the SCSI initiator module, there can be more than one FEID. It can bring SATA, parallel SCSI, fibre channel and other kind of disks into SAN environment in the same time. It can accelerate storage consolidation, and reduce storage management cost.