Automatic Parallelism Tuning Mechanism for Heterogeneous IP-SAN Protocols in Long-fat Networks

In this paper we propose Block Device Layer with Automatic Parallelism Tuning (BDL-APT), a mechanism that maximizes the goodput of heterogeneous IP-based Storage Area Network (IP-SAN) protocols in long-fat networks. BDL-APT parallelizes data transfer using multiple IP-SAN sessions at a block device layer on an IP-SAN client, automatically optimizing the number of active IP-SAN sessions according to network status. A block device layer is a layer that receives read/write requests from an application or a file system, and relays those requests to a storage device. BDL-APT parallelizes data transfer by dividing aggregated read/write requests into multiple chunks, then transferring a chunk of requests on every IP-SAN session in parallel. BDL-APT automatically optimizes the number of active IP-SAN sessions based on the monitored network status using our parallelism tuning mechanism. We evaluate the performance of BDL-APT with heterogeneous IP-SAN protocols (NBD, GNBD and iSCSI) in a long-fat network. We implement BDL-APT as a layer of the Multiple Device driver, one of major software RAID implementations included in the Linux kernel. Through experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of BDL-APT with heterogeneous IP-SAN protocols in long-fat networks regardless of protocol specifics.