The Research And Implementation Of ISCSI HBA Based On Intelligent I/O

With the development of network, network storage is being more and more widely used. And nowadays there are different types of architecture of network storage, Network Attached Storage and Fiber Channel Storage Area Network are two of the most mature and widespread technologies. The iSCSI protocol is able to combine the advantages of both technologies and used to construct IP Storage Area Network which can get higher performance and less cost.The iSCSI storage system can be divided to two parts-Initiator and Target. Initiator and Target connect by TCP/IP network. Usually, iSCSI Initiator is implemented by software, the host computer need to process every thing like TCP/IP and iSCSI protocol. But with the rapid development of network, the CPU of server can't handle the process of iSCSI and TCP/IP protocol. Because of this problem, Intel and other famous manufactures introduce intelligent I/O processor which can offload the process of some protocol of the host computer. And also give a protocol of intelligent I/O and make a specification for it.A architecture of iSCSI Host Bus Adapter based on Intelligent I/O protocol is given, it works as a Intelligent storage card to help host computer to process iSCSI and TCP/IP protocol. The objective of Intelligent I/O is to design a new architecture of device driver (Split-driver-mode), which can separate the code which handle the hardware and the code which connect with operation system. This architecture make transplanting device driver to other different operation system very easy.This iSCSI Host Bus Adapter was implemented in Intel IQ80321 embedded platform base on embedded Linux. At last the performance of this prototype was tested and compared with the software implement, and the results show that the prototype reach the basic goal of the design, but the performance is not good, it need to be improved in the future.