An Empirical Evaluation Methodology for iSCSI Storage Networking

Abstract

Cloud centric environments fueled by Ethernet dominant networking increasingly use iSCSI as a prevalent storage networking protocol among highly distributed and interconnected servers and storage devices. Numerous advances such as faster multi-core CPUs, hardware offloading engines, higher bandwidth networking and faster storage devices mandate a re-evaluation of iSCSI implementations and performance techniques. In this paper, we present a performance evaluation methodology targeting multiple layers in the protocol stack. Our evaluations include both software and hardware-accelerated implementations with a discussion on their pros and cons. The outcome of our work is an empirical study of the iSCSI protocol from several aspects which, to our best knowledge, is the first comprehensive profile on its performance based on real-world implementations.