Design for Intelligent Storage Controllers in IP SAN

We present a design of intelligent storage controllers in IP SAN environment to overcome the performance issues of IP SAN. The controllers are designed with clustering features to introduce parallelism thus increasing the performance of IP SAN. Also implementing the virtualization entity in controller hides the physical storage complexity. The performance bottlenecks created by introducing storage controllers can be overcome by implementing virtualization with packet forwarding system and global cache, thus avoiding encapsulation-decapsulation overheads and disk accesses for frequently accessed data respectively. The in-band approach used in the design of controllers gives complete control over the storage network, which is necessary for high availability and guaranteed performance. Also the controllers in clustering environment provide the benefits like high availability, scalability, load balancing and failover.