Simulation of fibre channel storage area network using SANSim

Fibre channel (FC) is presently the dominant protocol used in storage area network (SAN). In this paper, we present a new simulation tool - SANSim, for modeling and analyzing FC storage network. I/O performance of a FC RAM disk has been tested and compared with simulation results achieved from the SANSim model. The simulated results match the experimental readings within 3% error range. The FC arbitration schedules used in the current high-end storage system were also simulated and analyzed using SANSim. The results show that a new algorithm, "command first", proposed in this paper has 50% performance improvement compared with the conventional "fairness access" algorithm in read operation.