Design And Implementation Of NPIV Subsystem For FCoE Switch

With the business growing demand for data storage and user's increasing emphasis on the importance of storage, network storage technology plays a very important role in the current enterprise data storage applications. Among various network storage technologies, because of its own which has high reliability, flexibility, scalability, and many other advantages, SAN(Storage Area Network,) technology are being widely used by more and more large and medium enterprises and storage service providers. At the same time, the technology developed specifically for SAN---FC (Fibre Channel) has been established as the essences of SAN interconnect. Meanwhile, as can protect customer's existing investments in FC-SAN, mapping Fibre Channel to Ethernet so that can transit SAN data over Ethernet, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) standards are becoming increasingly recognized and promoted by the industry.As a part of FCoE technology, NPIV (N_Port Identifier Virtualization) technology allows ports on the FC devices apply more than one N_Port_ID, so as to achieve the purpose of the virtual N_ports. This would further enhance the SAN's connectivity, flexibility, the speed of resource allocation and data recovery.At present, foreign equipment manufacturers such as Cisco, EMC etc. has been produced FCoE series devices, and has been widely used and gained great benefits in the U.S. and European markets. In China, research on FCoE is still in its early stages. Therefore, the study of FCoE protocol and the development of the FCoE switch are very important in the technical sense and have broad market prospects.This paper is a summary of personal internship experience of NPV (N_Port Visualization) program in a telecommunications company's Phase II FCoE project. This project is based on the original developed software platform of this company. As a major participant in the project, my main task is to develop NPIV sub-system for the FCoE switch storage system. These tasks include the following two elements: receiving and transmission process of the application's packets for N-port ID; virtual N-port data preservation and maintenance: add, delete and modify operation of the virtual N-port data that is formed during the message sending and receiving process.This project uses the RAD model of software development process, depends on the company's software platform for the specific scenarios, design and implementation under the American Standards Association FC-LS-2, FC-FS-3 and FC-BB-5 protocol.The Targeted product of this project is to develop an FCoE switch, runs in SAN network environment. This device can be seen as a bridge between the ethernet and the SAN. It can access to FC / FCoE switches in SAN and it also can support N nodes (For example, servers or disk arrays).The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the method to implement NPIV subsystem in FCoE project. Therefore, in the first part of this paper, the background knowledge of technologies involved, the development of storage networking technologies, the content of FC and FCoE protocol and the key technology used in the project is being introduced. In the next part of this paper, the demand analysis of NPIV subsystem is described apart as functional and non functional requirements. Then, the design and implementation of design and implementation is being introduced, mainly include the data structure used and the basic idea of the algorithm used in the project. In the following part of this paper, verifying the validity of NPIV subsystem, and described the technology used in the testing phase. The next function of c design and implementation, describes the subsystem to the data structure used and the basic idea of the algorithm. NPIV functionality on the subsystem and then verified, describes the technology used in the testing phase, problems and solutions found. Finally, the work of the project are summarized and reviewed and pointed out some problems.