The maturity and mission-critical deployment of Fibre Channel (FC) in storage area networks (SANs) creates a unique class of multi-terabit networks with demanding throughput, latency, scalability, robustness, and availability requirements. This paper revie
4.2 Remote MirroringSourceTargetMAN/WANExample of Remote Figure 6 Remote Mirroring – Throughput vs Delay When performing remote mirroring of logical units (LUNs), remote copy operations must synchronize data copied to each of the LUNs to ensure data coherency within the mirror group. The effective throughput of the remote mirroring of 12 LUNs was shown to drop from 25 MBps to about 5 MBps as the round trip delay increases from 0 to 10 ms, as shown in Figure 6 [28]. It is important to configure and tune file and block size, MTU, MSS, and synchronization rate. In addition, the use of compression to reduce the amount of data transfer is important.4.3 Delay and Cache Effect on I/O WorkloadFigure 7 Delay and Cache Effect of PostMark Experiment PostMark was used to test the delay and cache sensitivity of the I/O workload of a large email server [29]. Figure 7 shows the PostMark transactions rate of I/O from a FreeBSD host to a storage element (SE) with varying delays (to the SE) and cache sizes in FreeBSD VM cache. The transaction rate declines as the delay is increased, and with larger cache sizes the transaction rate increases. Application performance sensitivity with111