A Portable Client/Server Communication Middleware over SANs: Design and Performance Evaluation with Virtual Interface and InfiniBand

In this paper, we address the problem of using high performance SAN technologies to provide efficient communication support in client/server type of environments. Our objective is to build a portable substrate which not only bridges the functionality gap between applications and SAN networks and preserves the performance of the underlying communication layer, but also provides the required flexibility for analyzing the impact of various modern communication techniques. We propose an architecture which exposes a simple queue based interface to applications. We take advantage of the features of modern SANs (such as OS bypass, zero copy, and RDMA) and use several techniques to improve the performance of our communication protocol. We have implemented our design for both InfiniBand and Virtual Interface Architecture (VIA). Our performance evaluation shows that the protocol processing overhead is low and the underlying communication performance can be preserved. We also discuss the performance impact of various communication techniques.