A Highly Efficient FC-SAN Based on Load Stream

The speed of storing and fetching data on SCSI disks has a great restriction on the efficiency of SAN based on Fiber Channel Network. In this paper, a high-efficient FC-SAN storage method attributed to the statistics conclusions of the file system workload is designed and implemented. By evaluating the load heavy or light, the system selects DISK or RAM devices as the main storage media according to the different I/O operations, i.e., file operations of larger size will be done on disk devices while reading/writing smaller size or file attribution operations will be done in RAMDISK devices. This method reduces the operations that store and fetch data on physical disks, adjusts the speed difference between CPU and DISK, and increases the efficiency of the system as a whole. Experimental testing proves good results and demonstrates that the application of RAM devices for I/O operation could increase the read efficiency of FC-SAN at about 50% to 100% and write performance at about 10% to 40%.