Performance Evaluation of Multiple TCP connections in iSCSI

Abstract

Storage area networks (SANs) based on fibre channel have been used extensively in the last decade while iSCSI is fast becoming a serious contender due to its reduced costs and unified infrastructure. This work examines the performance of iSCSI with multiple TCP connections. Multiple TCP connections are often used to realize higher bandwidth but there may be no fairness in how bandwidth is distributed. We propose a mechanism to share congestion information across multiple flows in "Fair-TCP" for improved performance. Our results show that Fair-TCP significantly improves the performance for I/O intensive workloads.