Analysis And Implementation Of ISCSI Protocol And Initiator On WINDOWS Platform

With the development of the Information technology, traditional local storage solution fails to meet the industrial requirements. So the network storage technology has developed a lot. Storage area network (SAN) has attracted a lot of focus and research as an important network storage technology. Traditional SAN mainly bases on Fibre Channel protocol, which possesses several disadvantages, such as high cost and short effective distance. Considering that IP network is a mature technology today, it is important to find out a new protocol which can utilize the IP network to solve the problem. iSCSI protocol doesn't rely on Fibre Channel. It uses TCP/IP as its transport protocol, which makes it to be a good candidate to construct low-cost, long-distance storage network. iSCSI has been adopted by IETF as a network storage standard and become an important solution for network storage.Firstly, this article gives out an overview for the SCSI Protocol and the common IP SAN protocols and compares the difference among them. And then it analyzes the iSCSI protocol. It focuses on some important aspects, such as the formats of the PDU, the management of sessions and the recovery for errors. After that this article introduces the background about WINDOWS device driver programming, including SCSI miniport driver, WMI and TDI programming skills, which are correlated with the implementation of the iSCSI initiator. Based on the prior work, this article discusses how to design and implement an iSCSI initiator on WINDOWS. It describes the consideration for the architecture of the iSCSI initiator and some techniques used to solve the problems met during the process of implementation. Finally, this article establishes a solid proposal to do the function, stability and performance test and writes down the statistics. It also works out some plan to optimize and improve the iSCSI initiator.