Storage network enhancement

Abstract

The volume of data that storage centers are handling is rising exponentially. This is due to increasing dependency by IT executives, trying to avoid rising infrastructural costs, subscribing to the services of technologies such as data storage centers.

With the evolution of data quality, people expect image, videos and audio files all in higher qualities, meaning larger file sizes. Coupled with the decreasing prices of data storage mediums such as hard disks, we can well anticipate an explosion in the sheer volume of data the future storage centers have to handle. The term storage centers and data centers are interchangeably used in this report and storage network simply refers to the network within the data flow path of a data center.

Larger file sizes means longer transmission times and this simply means that traditional network methodologies related to storage centers will soon become obsolete and thus it gives rise to this research topic – Storage Network Optimization.

The purpose of this project is to solve the problems of storage network congestion that aroused due to the increase in file sizes and heavy utilization. The solution was to come up with a more efficient switching algorithm and testing it against the original routing algorithm in an OpenFlow setup.

The testing environment setup and processes are recorded and documented. A hefty bulk of the time was involved in researching and finalizing the test bed environment and major changes had to be made due to lack of resources.

Finally, the performance results of the algorithm were obtained and included in the conclusion of this report