Level 5 Networks: EtherFabric

EtherFabric improves storage area networking (SAN) performance by:

Improving iSCSI application response time
Increasing network bandwidth beyond the 1Gb iSCSI limit
Improving the reliability of iSCSI by using TCP

The storage requirements of companies have been growing rapidly year over year, and show no sign of slowing down. These requirements include the capability to continually scale the bandwidth within the storage tier and the networked connections to the other tiers without compromising the latency.

The storage tier is the repository of all critical corporate data. The database and storage servers do all the heavy lifting in terms of data manipulation for the web services and application tiers. An effective storage area network (SAN) must provide efficient, high speed access to, and ensure the uncompromised integrity of the data.

The standard iSCSI SAN architecture consists of the SCSI command set over TCP/IP and Ethernet. As iSCSI SAN solutions improve and mature, the iSCSI share of the SAN market continues to grow as the solution becomes more popular. EtherFabric promises to have a very positive affect on iSCSI adoption, by addressing the performance, bandwidth and reliability limitations of existing iSCSI implementations.

EtherFabric dramatically speeds throughput in the SAN between the network and the application reduces the latency of server transactions. This noticeably improves the date throughput performance of iSCSI SANs.

Current iSCSI implementations are limited to 1Gb due to the high cost of 10Gb Ethernet ports. EtherFabric supports a port striping mode that can aggregate 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports together logically to accelerate a single TCP/IP iSCSI flow, doubling the useable bandwidth between servers or disk arrays in the SAN. EtherFabric’s port striping mode delivers the high performance bandwidth that iSCSI SANs need and provides a future proof migration to affordable 10Gb iSCSI solutions in the future.

EtherFabric uses standard TCP stacks to guarantee packet delivery and ordering during a data transfer. iSCSI SANs rely on a robust transport protocol to protect the integrity of the data store. EtherFabric enabled iSCSI combines reliability with efficiency and high performance to make it the best technology for high performance storage networking.

Ethernet is already being adopted as a solution for SANs (Storage Area Networks).