On the interconnection topology for storage area networks
Xavier Molero, F. Sills, Vicente Santonja, José F. Duato · 2005
Department d’Informatica de Sistemes i Computadors Clusters of workstations are becoming an interesting al-ternative to parallel computers for those applications with high needs of resources such as memory, processing powe< and input/output storage capacity. Also, the fast growth of data intensive applications has caused a change in the tra-ditional storage model. The server-to-disk approach is be-ing replaced by storage area networks (SANS). SANS are a separate network for storage, isolated from the messaging network and optimized for the movement of data between servers and storage devices. Depending on the required network size and the environment targeted for the SAN, different interconnection topologies may be advis-able, affecting both performance and cost. Moreove ~ for a given topology, the routing algorithm used by messages also influences network performance. In this paper we analyze the impact of network topol-ogy on both performance and cost of storage area net-works. This analysi,s is pe~ormedfor up */down * and mini-mal adaptive routin,g in the context of two different environ-ments: buildings and departments. We show that depending on the network topology and the routing scheme, differences in the pe~ormance/cost ratio may increase by a factor of up to 6. Moreove ~ we demonstrate that slightly modifiing the network topology, such as adding a few new links, we can noticeably improve the overall performance without signif-icantly affecting the total cost. 1.