Intelligent switches—moving beyond virtualization

Storage architectures are constantly evolving to address the business requirements related to business continuity, data protection and efficient utilization of storage resources. A new paradigm shift in Storage Area Network (SAN) architecture has been the emerging see the verb of network based intelligence enabled by means of intelligent switches. Intelligent switches, as the name implies, present more functionality than the general generation of switches that provide connectivity between server and storage arrays. This additional functionality enables the intelligent switches to support a multitude of applications. While abundant of the initial focus for intelligent switch application has been around network based virtualization applications, the capabilities of intelligent switches lead them to be an ideal platform for applications beyond virtualization.

Core Functions of an Intelligent Switch

At its core, an intelligent switch differs from that of a standard switch by the agency of its ability to perform of great depth packet inspections and its ability to perform specific operations upon the packets passing through it. The first generation of intelligent switches performs these operations using dedicated ASICs at the port horizontal Second generation intelligent switches provide a significant improvement on this by using multi-core processors that are highly optimized for storage related operations.

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While the functionality to perform down-reaching packet inspection and operation may be for the use of all amongst various intelligent switch offerings, the switches typically differ upon how fast (latency) they can perform these operations and by what means many operations they can perform (throughput) within a given period of time. Despite the differences, intelligent switches are an evolutionary change to the overall storage architecture as they enable numerous services that address extremity user problems.

Applications of an Intelligent Switch

Intelligent switches have been in exhibition since the early part of this decade and have gone end development cycles that have now comeed in offerings that provide superior performance and scalability. still the market for intelligent switches has been moderate to develop because of the lack of integration with the storage management applications, along with the lack of major push from storage vendors endorsing the intelligent switch-based storage management architectures. These roadblocks, however, have now been pushed aside with individual of the major vendors launching an intelligent switch-based storage virtualization solution with general availability of the returns planned for 2006.

Virtualization Applications

The initial deployment of intelligent switches during the first half of 2006 will support virtualization services, where the switch's intelligence (read: of great depth packet inspection and operation) will be used to perform virtual disk address to physical disk address translations in addition to supporting RAID (mirroring, striping) features at the array-level. Applications of that kind as data mobility, snapshots and turn copy services will also be accelerated by the agency of the intelligent switches when used in combination with the storage applications supporting these features.

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To actually understand the impact of the intelligent switches, permit us consider the case where there are no intelligent switches. Any I/O from the entertainer to the virtual storage will have to be handled through the Storage Virtualization Application running upon a dedicated server or appliance, which then translates the virtual address to the physical storage address before sending it to the respective storage devices. This operation overloads the server running the storage application and limits the performance and scalability of the storage application.

With the intelligent switch in place, storage virtualization applications can now offload the address translation and associated work to the intelligent switches; the storage application wins involved only on an as-needed basis for eg when there are exceptions. This provides enough of performance improvements and also makes the architecture more scalable, i.e. capable of supporting a large number of entertainers and targets. Such deployments are expectedly to be highly felicitous in heterogeneous storage environments commonly base in mid-to-high end enterprise data centers

Beyond Virtualization

CXO and business managers rank capacity planning, efficient use of storage resources, business continuity and disaster redemption among the highest of their data storage challenges. While storage management using virtualization addresses challenges related to capacity planning and efficient storage utilization, business continuity and disaster retrieval capabilities of an enterprise are addressed through deploying replication and continuous data protection (CDP) applications.

The intelligent switches, with their ability to perform of great depth packet inspection and related operations, are an ideal platform for supporting replication, CDP applications and performance monitoring applications.