Design And Implementation Of FCoE Forwarder's Fabric Configuration State Machine

With the development of computer and network technology, more and more information is digitized, this information needs to be storaged for a long time and can be retrieved quickly and easily, so the FCP protocol which is for the data transmission of local storage based on the SAN has emerged.In order to solve the communication between the SAN and the Ethernet transmission rate and the cost of the problem, FCoE technology has emerged, and so do the FCoE forwarder. Because of the advancement of the FCoE technology and the great benefits it brings, there's a great significance and a broad market background of researching and developing about the FCoE network storage technology.This article is written based on the project which the authorl participated in a communications software company, and it is mainly about the developing work based on the FC and FCoE protocol.This subject's main task is to complete the switch based on the FC and FCoE protocol, which includes the deep researching and understanding of the switch principal.This project is developed on the company's software developing platform, and it supports FC protocol, FCoE protocol and also the DCE protocol. As an key player in this project, my main responsibilty is to design and implement the Fabric configuration state machine of the storaged switch based on FC and FCoE protocol, and achieved the following main functions, the election of primary switch, applying and assigning domain ID address non-primary function, assign the FC address for the terminal equipment of directing connection function, the maintenace of primary link funtion, registration for the other modules and etc. In the analysis and design process of this project, it is mainly based on the American Standards Association FC-SW-5 protocol, and then achieved based on the company's software platform.Throughout the whole project development process, the project team uses the V model for developing and testing job, and also uses a large number of software developing technologies and techniques during the realization, including the callback function technique, hashing techniques, information and event mechanisms. In the testing phase of this project, the author took part in the whole testing work, including unit testing, implementation testing,and also the system test. The author mainly used the Python language to write the test cases.The project develop the interface of the FCF switch supports connecting with other switch in the SAN network, supports connecting with the terminal like the server and the disk. Meanwhile it supports the Ethernet port who has the ability to support the DCE protocol, which enhance the DCE features on the original Ethernet inerface.FCF switch also supports the hardware forwarding chip, it can realize the hardware data forwarding between the FC physical port and also the DCE interface. The author develop the Fabric configuration state machine based on the FC and the FCoE protocol, implement the seamless connection between the FCoE SANand FC SAN, and also achieve all the function points of the requirement analysis. In the FCF switch, Fabric configuration state machine is at the core position, and it has a close relationships between other modules.Therefore, the article not only has a theoretical value of the FCoE protocol and Fabric configuration state machine configuration process, and also play an auxiliary role for the readers who are not familiar with the storage network technology and FCoE protocol, meanwhile it also has some value for others of this rearching area.