Performance Analysis of iSCSI & iSER in MPIO Environment.

iSCSI is an emerging storage network technology that allows block-level access to storage devices, such as disk drives, over a computer network. Since iSCSI runs over the ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol, it has many advantages over its more proprietary alternatives. Due to the recent movement toward 10 gigabit Ethernet, storage vendors are interested to see the benefits this large increase in network bandwidth could bring to iSCSI. In order to make full use of the bandwidth provided by a 10 gigabit Ethernet link, specialized Remote Direct Memory Access hardware is being developed to offload processing and reduce the data-copy-overhead found in a standard TCP/IP network stack.This analysis will cover the performance benefit of using RDMA in iSCSI environment over the normal software iSCSI stack. This presentation will also cover the benefit in a single path environment as well as multipaths environment.

Learning Objectives

While using iSCSI over RDMA, it gives around 20% performance advantage over non-RDMA software iSCSI
Used UNH iSCSI initiator & target as its open source, and modified the same to adapt in different environment.
As today's iSCSI solution can't utilize the full bandwidth provided by 10 gig Ethernet, iSER can be used to get better utilization of the existing bandwidth.
iSER can be integrated in all the open-source as well as closed source multupathing solutions and achieve the require High Availability.