Design and development of Ethernet-based storage area network protocol

In response to the trend of rapidly growing volume of and increasingly critical role played by data storage, there is a strong demand to share storage over network. In this paper, we present an Ethernet-based storage area network protocol, called HyperSCSI. It is designed to transport the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) protocol data across Ethernet and provide relatively high performance with simplicity and low cost. It is demonstrated through comprehensive experiment results that HyperSCSI is capable of using the existing Ethernet-based network infrastructure, common off-the-shelf hardware, and well-established storage technologies, and turning them into a high performance and reliable network storage solution. Although HyperSCSI protocol is developed with the focus on local area network, a field trial has been demonstrated that it can leverage high-speed optical network with Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) control to support wide area storage applications. Such protocol design work also provides a simple and efficient environment for investigating network storage characteristic and building new type of SAN over generic network infrastructure.