Improving Network Performance by Efficiently Dealing with Short Control Messages in Fibre Channel SANs

摘要

Traffic in a Storage Area Networks is bimodal, composed of long messages carrying several KBytes of data, and short messages containing control information (I/O commands). From the network point of view, latency of control messages is highly affected by the transmission of data messages, due to their length. As a consequence, it is necessary to establish management policies that benefit the transmission of short control messages, thus reducing the overall response time for I/O operations and increasing network throughput. In this paper we propose several strategies for dealing with short control messages and analyze their impact on the performance of storage area networks. This analysis is carried out for a fully adaptive routing algorithm in the context of two different network topology environments: buildings and departments. Simulation results show that both I/O response time and network throughput may be improved when efficiently managing control messages.