Scalable, high performance InfiniBand-attached SAN Volume Controller

Abstract

We have developed a highly reliable InfiniBand host attached block storage management and virtualization system that supports several off-the-shelf Fibre Channel RAID controllers on the back end. The system is based on the existing IBM TotalStorage SAN Volume Controller (SVC) product, and therefore offers performance, a wide array of storage virtualization features, and support for many existing storage controllers. We provide an overview of the driver design as well as performance results. Large read performance from SVC cache exceeds 3 GB/s in a minimal two-node cluster configuration.