Remote iSCSI cache on InfiniBand: an approach to optimize iSCSI system

iSCSI implements the SAN technology over the Internet (TCP/IP) that brings economy and convenience whereas it also raises issues such as performance and reliability. While cache can be used to improve the performance of iSCSI system, cache inclusive will negatively influence the system´s performance in multiple-level cache hierarchy. Moreover, traditional methods to get rid of this phenomenon are limited by complex cache management algorithms and heavy network traffic. On the other hand, the rapid-developed modern networks such as 10- Gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet, Quadrics and InfiniBand offer reliability, low-latency and high-bandwidth characteristics which can be used to build novel cache schemes in iSCSI system. In our paper, we proposed a new cache management algorithm on iSCSI called Remote iSCSI Cache (RiCache). RiCache is a two-level cache with only one manager residing on initiator. At the same time, RMP (Remote Memory Pool) based on InfiniBand network is used to share the target´s memory to the initiator. Our performance evaluation shows that after applying the RiCache, the performance of iSCSI system gets promotion by up 20.8% to 79.2% in terms of system throughput