Pipelining scheduling and hierarchical-volume management in a storage area network

This paper implements two technologies in a storage area network (SAN): pipelining scheduling and hierarchical volume management. Firstly, we design a pipelining-scheduling, which overlaps network transfer procedure and disk I/O procedure. Concretely, two kinds of pipelining scheduling schemes have been implemented: (1) Fixed pipelining scheduling (FPS) synchronizing the pipeline stages at fixed time point; (2) Variable pipelining scheduling (VPS) synchronizing the pipeline stages dynamically according to the completion sequence of multiple procedures. Secondly, the hierarchical logical volume management (HLVM) provides a kind of storage virtualization on the different layers. By decomposing the original SCSI address, it builds a virtual layer between the physical storage devices and the applications