iSCSI Simulation Study of Storage System

Abstract

Demands for more storage in the industry has increased beyond that the traditional storage mechanisms can supply and thus, the concept of Storage Area Networks (SANs) has evolved. This has resulted in the design of iSCSI (Internet SCSI) protocols that have SCSI commands and allow data transfer to take place over the network. Fiber channel protocol was the first such protocol that used Gigabit per second links to carry commands over long distances. The iSCSI Protocol maps the SCSI block oriented storage data over TCP/IP and enables storage devices to be accessed over standard Ethernet based TCP/IP networks, With the development of Gigabit Ethernet and the iSCSI protocol, reduction in costs and a uniform network infrastructure can be achieved.Simulation offers a flexible way to study the iSCSI – based storage systems. We wish to study a storage area network, which uses iSCSI Protocol to exchange data between its various nodes. This study will help us in understanding how iSCSI works in a storage area network. We have used ns2 for our simulation work. We have simulated an iSCSI initiator and an iSCSI target, which communicate through iSCSI. iSCSI lies upon TCP Protocol. R/W requests are made by the iSCSI initiator and data exchange takes place depending on these requests. The throughput is calculated and graph is plotted.