Design And Implementation Of Port Mirroring And Link Aggregation Function On FC Switch

With the development of computer and network, data storage has become a booming area of research. Because of its advantages in high performance, availability, scalability and sharing resources, storage area network(SAN) has become the first choice to store data for many companies. With the propose of Fibre Channel(FC) protocol, the advantages of its high bandwidth, low latency, long distance transmission make fibre channel technology widely used in storage area network. The rapid development of the computer network led to more complex network topolopy, the difficulty in managing the entire network also incseases for administrator. To solve this problem, many switch vendors add port mirroring function on the switch for monitoring and troubleshooting. For the problem of shortage in network bandwidth caused by increase in data flow, link aggregation provides a simple and cheap method.This paper first describles the fibre channel protocol, details of the protocol level, the frame structure and flow control. This is the theoretical basis for the design of the FC switch. Then it introduces common switch structures and cached modes, and analyzes the characteristics of different structures and modes.Then, The paper introduces FC switch framework of the project, and makes a detailed explanation of receive module, scheduling module, crossbar and RDY control module and transmission module. Receiver mainly realizes the cache of data frames. Scheduling module realizes the exchange of data frames between ports. The transmission module implements sending data frames and flow control. Besides, it add port mirroring and link aggregation functions on the FC switch. Port mirroring is implemented by the multicast address. Link aggregation implements flow sharing and redundant backup capabilities when debugging between two FC switches.Finally, we build a platform for testing. First we use modelsim for functional simulation, then we use altera company’s board for board test, at last, we analyze data on the fibre by finisar’s logic analyzer.