An Adaptive Flow Control Method for Fiber Channel Storage Expansion

Abstract

The invention discloses an adaptive flow control method for storage extension of a fibre channel. The method comprises the steps of (1) initializing, (2) taking a fibre channel frame out of a buffer area queue head, packaging according to a protocol format of a wide area network, and forwarding a packaged data frame through a wide area network interface of a storage extension gateway by storage extension flow control protocol control and a buffer area threshold adaptive adjustment method, and (3) receiving the fibre channel frame. According to the method, the update frequency of Credit in an FC (fibre channel) flow control protocol between the storage extension gateway and an SAN (storage area network) is adjusted according to a relation between the actual queue length and high and low threshold values of an adaptive gateway cache data queue, the queuing time delay of the FC frame in the gateway is reduced effectively, the storage extensibility is improved, the link bandwidth of a storage extension network is fully used, the length of a cache queue of a receiving party is flexibly increased or decreased, and the performance of the storage extension gateway is improved.

Description

technical field [0001] The invention relates to an adaptive fiber channel storage expansion flow control method. Background technique [0002] The importance of disaster recovery and business continuity is increasingly recognized. Studies have pointed out that a 48-hour storage system interruption can cause a data-intensive enterprise to close down. Therefore, the demand for remote storage network expansion is increasing day by day. In addition, the integration of storage resources and data centers, storage network outsourcing and other applications also drive the demand for storage network expansion. Storage network extension refers to the use of metropolitan area network or wide area network MAN / WAN (Metropolitan Area Network / Wide Area Network) to extend the distance of storage area network SAN (Storage Area Network). The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) developed the storage expansion backbone standard FC_BB, and the Storage Network...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

The existing storage expansion standard does not provide a synchronization mechanism between multiple flow control protocols. When MAN / WAN is congested, a large number of FC frames will be buffered in the sending gateway and the queuing delay will increase. When the delay exceeds the timeout of the FC protocol When the threshold value is exceeded, the retransmission of the FC frame sequence (including multiple FC frames) will be triggered, greatly reducing the performance of storage expansion

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