Methods and systems for converged networking and storage

Abstract

A device includes a converged input/output controller that includes a physical target storage media controller, a physical network interface controller and a gateway between the storage media controller and the network interface controller, wherein gateway provides a direct connection for storage traffic and network traffic between the storage media controller and the network interface controller.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims priority to the following provisional applications, each of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety: U.S. patent application 61 / 950,036, filed Mar. 8, 2014 and entitled “Method and Apparatus for Application Driven Storage Access”; and U.S. patent application 62 / 017,257, filed Jun. 26, 2014 and entitled “Apparatus for Virtualized Cluster IO”.FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0002]This application relates to the fields of networking and data storage, and more particularly to the field of converged networking and data storage devices.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]The proliferation of scale-out applications has led to very significant challenges for enterprises that use such applications. Enterprises typically choose between solutions like virtual machines (involving software components like hypervisors and premium hardware components) and so-called “bare metal” solutions (typically involving use of an operat...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0025]In embodiments, methods and systems disclosed herein include storage/network tunneling, wherein the tunneling path between storage systems over a network does not involve the operating system of a source or target computer. In conventional systems, one had separate storage and network paths, so accessing storage remotely, required extensive copying to and from memory, I/O buses, etc. Merging the two paths means that storage traffic is going straight onto the network. The OS 108 of each computer sees only a local disk. Another advantage is simplicity of programming. A user does not need to separately program a SAN, meaning that the methods disclosed herein include a one-step programmable SAN. Rather than requiring discovery and specification of zones, and the like, encryption, attachmen

Problems solved by technology

The proliferation of scale-out applications has led to very significant challenges for enterprises that use such applications.

At large scale, virtual machine solutions typically have poor input-output (IO) performance, inadequate memory, inconsistent performance, and high infrastructure cost.

Bare metal solutions typically have static resource allocation (making changes in resources difficult and resulting in inefficient use of the hardware), challenges in planning capacity, inconsistent performance, and operational complexity.

In both cases, inconsistent performance characterizes the existing solutions.

Referring to FIG. 2, one major problem with hypervisors is with the complexity of IO operations.

Such activities involve very large numbers of IO operations, which result in poor performance in hypervisor solutions.

Users of those applications also frequently re-shard (change the shards on which data is deployed), resulting in big problems for bare metal solutions that have static storage resource allocations, as migration of data from one location to another also involves many copying and transport operations,

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