Fibre Channel Switch Modeling at Fibre Channel-2 Level for Large Fabric Storage Area Network Simulations using OMNeT++

Abstract

Abstract—Typically, in the current enterprise data centers dedicated fabrics or networks are implemented to meet their LAN, Inter-Processor communication and storage traffic requirements. The storage traffic requirements of a group of servers are met through multiple storage area networks based on fibre channel, which has become the standard connection type. Typically, this fibre channel storage area networks are small (maximum of 32 switches/directors in a single fabric) and do not experience any scaling, stability and other performance issues.
The advent of I/O consolidation in enterprise data centers for multiple traffic types to converge on to a single fabric or network (typically Ethernet platform) to reduce hardware, energy and management costs has also the potential to allow implementation of large storage area networks based on the fibre channel standards. Large storage area networks are being planned with more than two hundred switches/directors in a single fabric or network in addition to servers and storages connected to the fabric on Ethernet platforms. Even though these large storage area networks are envisioned to operate on Ethernet platform, they still have to satisfy the stringent operating and performance requirement set forth by the fibre channel standards. The two important issues of concern with large storage area networks are scaling and stability. The scaling and stability issues are dependent on the interactions and performance capabilities of various fabric servers located on each switch/director in the fabric in order to provide fabric services. In order to determine the extent of scaling and stability issues of a large fabric first the detailed models of the switch/director addressing the operations of the individual fabric servers are required. Next, the interactions of the switches/directors using the detailed models are to be simulated to study the scaling and stability issues.
In this paper, the detailed modeling of the fibre channel switch and the fabric servers using the OMNeT++ discrete event simulator is presented first. Detailed models are developed addressing the behavior of the switch at the level-2 of the fibre channel protocol since this layer addresses the requirements and operations of various mandatory fabric services like fabric build, directory, login, nameserver, management, etc. Next, using the OMNET++ discrete event simulator large fabrics are simulated. The results from the simulation are compared against the test bed traffic and the accuracy is demonstrated. Also, results and analysis of multiple simulations with increasing fabric size are presented.