Optimization of the Switches in Storage Networks Nianmin Yao 1 , Xiuli Zhao, Huimin Meng 2 , and Xinlei Jiang 3 1 College of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China yaonianmin@hrbeu.edu.cn 2 Dalian Institute of Light Industry 3 China Construction Bank Abstract. In the Storage Area Network (SAN), the mature network technology is used to substitute for the IO bus. Usually, the common switch is used in the storage network especially in the iSCSI storage sys- tem. Because the common switches are not aware of the environment it is used in, it can not make optimization for the storage network. In this paper, an optimization of storage network is presented which can greatly improve the performance and resource utilization of the whole storage system. In this optimization, the IO acknowledgment commands passing through the switch which is used in storage network are transferred in highest priority. This optimization of SAN has been certified by the sim- ulation experiments. Keywords: SAN, performance, network, switch. 1 Introduction With the developing of the Internet, a dramatic growth of enterprise data stor- age capacity can be observed in the last couple of years. Many things including a lot of enterprise data coming onto the internet; data warehouse, e-business and especially the Web contents contribute the growth of storage. People require more and more performance, capacity and manageability of the storage with the time goes by. So the relative slow developing speed of the storage compared to the other parts of the computer system such as CPU, network bandwidth and so on are becoming the bottleneck of IT. Now, the SAN (Storage Area Network) is a popular technology to solve these problems. It can ensure the reliability, ser- viceability, scalability and availability of the storage. But now it obviously can not satisfy the increasing need of market, so many researchers are working on improving the technology of SAN. There are three main components in an SAN environment such as server systems, storage devices and interconnect devices. So methods to improve the SAN are mainly focused on these three components. For example, many data placement algorithms, for example [1][2][3][4] and so on, which mainly improve the storage devices are proposed to get more performance and scalability of the storage system. In this paper, we focus on the optimization Y. Shi et al. (Eds.): ICCS 2007, Part III, LNCS 4489, pp. 66–73, 2007. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007