San Technology And Its Applied Research, In A Heterogeneous Network Of Shared Storage System

Now the importance of computer system development has changed from the circumstance of hardware and software to the applications and data. The corporations also have higher and higher requirements for data storage technology. Storage Area Network appears for meeting the requirements. SAN applies the mature network technology into storage management, which makes the previous concept of point-to-point connection between storage equipments and servers changed essentially. In SAN storage the equipments aren't the attachments of some servers, instead they link into the whole one which provides services for all the servers.The author studied SAN technology carefully, participated in an international project, and designed a heterogeneous network storage sharing system. Now the production of the project has put into practice.SAN storage sharing system is a new-style distributing network system. The clients in the system can access the data on RAIDs directly through high-speed network ( Fibre Channel or IP network) not using the servers to transmit, which can prove the performance of the whole system. Conventional storage system need modify the kernel of the system. This increases the difficulty of the implementation and maintainability, and makes the applications limited by the kernel. This article designs a SAN storage sharing system based on open system (UNEX, Linux , Windows). Main functions of storage sharing system are sharing heterogeneous data sources, data storage transparency and high-speed reading/writing data sources. It has been realized the system based on SAN in an internal project. At last, the analysis of the performance of the middleware shows that the system has local storage system-like performance.The article summarizes the author's study work and production. At first it introduces particularly SAN concept, characteristic, application, physical framework and top structure. Then it describes particularly the design and function of SAN sharing storage system and analyses the main technologies such as network sharing storage, mainframe cluster, multi-path etc deeply. At last it analyses the performance of the storage sharing system and summarizes the characteristic, shortcomings and the fields that need to be studied.