Cisco Research Support

01-03-2003

Prof. Suresh Jagannathan Receives $70,000 to Study Storage Protocols

Cisco Systems is providing $70,000 to support Prof. Jagannathan's research in storage protocols. An abstract of this project follows.

There has been significant recent interest on unifying storage area networks with traditional IP-based LANs. As a means of achieving this unification, both industry and academia have studied the prospect of providing traditional storage protocols (mainly SCSI and FC) on top of IP interconnects. Furthermore, to reduce protocol processing on the server CPU, there is a growing trend to move such processing onto the NIC.

We are studying the impact of Storage over IP (SoIP) networks especially as they relate to I/O intensive database applications. Because database systems are particularly sensitive to network performance and scalability issues, they provide an excellent metric with which to test the effectiveness of SoIP networks on I/O intensive workloads. Moreover, because I/O can constitute a significant fraction of total execution in real-world database loads, the benefits of offloading I/O processing to the network interface may be especially pronounced.

More information about this project and Prof. Jagannathan's other interests can be found on his web page: https://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/faculty/suresh/