A Mixed-Integer Approach to Storage Area Network Design using Generic Network Components
Michael J. O’Sullivan, Cameron Graham Walker · ResearchSpace (University of Auckland) · 2005
With the current trend toward centralised storage, storage area networks are becoming a critical part of commercial computer networks. In this paper we present a formal definition of the storage area network design problem. We summarise an approach from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories for solving this problem that considers all possible network components and uses mixed- integer programming to select a design. We also summarise a preprocessing method that significantly reduces the size of this formulation. We then present a new formulation that uses generic components instead of including all pos- sible components. We modify the preprocessing method to provide an cost function for the generic components. The size of our generic formulation is a significant reduction from the size of the Hewlett-Packard formulation. We compare the two formulations using a small example storage area network design problem.