The Design And Optimization Of FPGA-based FCoE Adapter

For a long time, SAN is always the best proposals of building Enterprise-class data centers. The SAN will be more expansive and more complicated as the data centers growing. In order to make the structure of the data center simpler while reducing the costs and complexity, Fiber channel over Ethernet(FCo E) is a new technology of converging network and will be used more often in the next generation of data centers. FCo E can combine the SAN and traditional Ethernet and make SAN and traditional Ethernet share a simpler network infrastructure. FCo E has become a research focus to simplifying the network infrastructure.The focus of this research is the implementation, the Optimization of the hardware and the system verification of the FCo E adaptor. The main functions of the FCo E adaptor is processing and forwarding the data of sending or receiving with high speed. Reference to the cycle and the difficult of the development, we designed the FCo E adaptor with the center of FPGA and with the PHY of Ethernet, the flash unit, DDR unit and so on as peripherals. On the basis of the analysis of the performance requirements of the FCo E adaptor, we design a FPGA-based system which Micro Blaze is in the center of the system, including the hardware and software. The hardware offer a data transferred channel and include processor of Micro Blaze, DMA controller, PCIe Bridge and MAC controller. The data is sending from the memory to the network or receiving from network to memory. The function of the software is communication with the host, configure the DMA controller and manage the FCo E adaptor's working mode. We optimize the original system through the analysis. The result of the system verification of the FCo E adaptor shows that we implement the function of the FCo E adaptor that the hosts can exchange data with storage node through the FCo E adaptor and achieve the expected performance of the subject.