SOCKETS DIRECT PROTOCOL OVER INFINIBAND FOR HIGH PERFORMANCE & FAULT-TOLERANT SCALE OUT NAS SYSTEM

Abstract

Conventional network protocols such as TCP/IP have traditionally been implemented in kernel space and have not been able to scale with increasing network speeds. Accordingly, they form the primary communication bottleneck in current high-speed networks like 10G Ethernet and Infiniband. In order to allow existing TCP/IP applications thathad been written on top of the sockets interface to take advantage of high-speednetworks, researchers have come up with a number of solutions including high performance sockets. The primary idea of high-performance sockets is to build apseudo sockets-like implementation which utilizes the advanced features of high-speednetworks while maintaining the TCP/IP sockets interface. This allows existing TCP/IPsockets based applications to transparently achieve a high performance. The Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) is an industry standard for such high performance sockets over the InniBand (IB) and Ethernet networks. In this dissertation, we focus on designing and enhancing SDP over IB for storage systems like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN). Specifically we divide the research performed into two parts: (i) Enhancing performance of network communication by using SDP over IB. (ii) Ensuring high availability of the system by designing failover mechanisms for SDP over IB. In this dissertation, we propose application aware failover as well as application transparent failover for SDP over IB.