The Research And Implementation Of Inter Canister Communication Channel Based On SBB Specification

SINA(Storage Networking Industry Association) pointed out that the global storage data is doubling each year. A varity of brand new applications, such as E-commerce, Monster Data of Media Services, Data Warehouse, Internet Site Mirror, Telecom Biling Service, OSS(Operation Support System) and BSS(Business Support System) all bring massive storage data. The bottleneck of IT currently is not calculation but storage, and the infrastructure of network is converted from computation-intensive to storage-intensive. The architecture of storage systems are different from each other, but the most basic unit of them is the disk array, which implements different interface technology, such as SAS, SATA, FC and PCIe. Therefore, the research and implementation of enclosure management firmware of disk array canisters become more and more important during the development of storage systems.The main purpose of this dissertation is to design and implement an Inter Canister Communication Channel between two hot-swappable redundancy canisters inside a disk arry. Through this communication channel, upward providing interfaces for enclosure management application, downward accessing different physich link through adaption.First of all, the dissertation will introduce the SBB(Storage Bridge Bay) specification, and analyze the characteristics and system architecture of SBB specification. This dissertation will also point out how to design a canister which is compatible with SBB specification. If a canister is compatible with SBB specification, it could be mounted and work together steadly with any disk enclosures which also be designed based on SBB specification.Then, the dissertation will study on SES(Storage Enclosure Service), and analy the characteristics of SES protocol. Enclosure management application of canister must be designed and implemented based on SES, and the format of transmission data exchanged between canister and up-stream RAID(Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) or HBA(Host Bus Adapter) must be refered to SES protocol.Next, the dissertation will state the design and implementation of Inter Canister Communication Channel based on the contents instroduced above. This paper will defined the physical layer interface, protocol layer, fault tolerant algorithm and the retransmission mechanism of this communication channel. It will also research the overall architecture of the Inter Canister communication channel, define the working process and give critical data structures of each module and code segments. And also define the upper lever applications which will utilize the Inter Canister Communication Channel.At last an application example will be given to verify the design of this Inter Canister Communication Channel. And summarizes the lacks, and points out the direction of the future development.