A Protocol vSCSI for Ethernet-based Network Storage

Abstract

Ethernet-based network storage protocols such as iSCSI have become increasingly common in today's storage network. In this paper, we propose and implement another new protocol vSCSI (Vl-attached SCSI) for competing with iSCSI in LAN environment, and experimentally compare performance ofvSCSI and iSCSI for environments with no data sharing across machines. Using VI replaces TCP/IP, vSCSI achieves higher throughput than iSCSI, meanwhile maintains low cost. The test results on the Linux platform show that vSCSI outperforms iSCSI for data intensive workloads. In average, vSCSI performs better than iSCSI by 115.12% in the way of sequence write and 35.02% in sequence read. The high-bandwidth and low-latency of VI providing are the primary reasons for this performance difference.