Design And Implementation Of A VI-based High-performance Storage Network System

To solve GIS (Geography Information System) and other application systems's huge demand for cheep mass storage network system with high bandwidth and low latency, VISA (Virtual Interface Storage Architecture) which based on VIA(Virtual Interface Architecture) communication protocol and Ethernet technology is brought out. VISA is a high-performance storage network system which combined kernel level VIA communication protocol and SAN technology, which is implemented with storage node and metadata server and client node, and which accords with purpose of block-level virtualization, and strategy of allocation and mapping of storage resource, and dynamic placement and layout of data.VIA protocol is a light-weight user-level communication protocol which has been used in the cluster computing environment widely and has approved its advantage compared to TCP/IP protocol practically. Kernel-level VIA protocol which fit storage network system more is implemented upon the basis of open M-VIA source code, a user-level VIA protocol implementation. To making VIA protocol run upon gigabit Ethernet transmission medium, a device driver which supports VIA protocol and TCP/IP protocol on the linux platform is implemented by using SysKonnect Company's SK-9821 gigabit Ethernet network adapter. By testing performance of kernel-level VIA protocol and TCP/IP protocol on the platform, the advantage of the performance of the former can be proved.The storage node of VISA storage network system used modularization design method and creating buffer cache, using data aggregation, multi-thread parallel operation and other technologies. The metadata management subsystem of VISA storage network system is a block-level and high-performance metadata management system and have the capability of mapping between physical and logical block addresses, and dynamic address mapping, and dynamic block reallocation, and hot block redundancy store, which make data layout more reasonable and promote agility of storage management. By testing performance of VISA and iSCSI, it can be proved that the former's performance is more preferable.