An Experimental Performance Analysis of AoE and iSCSI Storage Protocols

  • Pedro Eugênio Rocha UFPR
  • Leonardo Antônio dos Santos UniBrasil

Abstract


This paper presents an experimental performance comparison of the storage protocols AoE and iSCSI. Through the execution of a set of microbenchmarks and macrobenchmarks, we analyze the performance and efficiency of both protocols in terms of achieved throughput, cache memory, network and CPU utilization. Based on these results, we state that the protocol must be carefully chosen considering the workloads to be used, as well as any possible memory or CPU restrictions.

References

Aiken, S., Grunwald, D., Pleszkun, A., and J.Willeke (2003). A performance analysis of the iscsi protocol. In IEEE/11th Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies, pages 123–134.

Aycock, C. (2006). What is the difference between scsi and ata? [link].

Chuang, H. and Wenbi, R. (2009). Modeling and performance evaluation of the aoe protocol. In International Conference on Multimedia Networking and Security, pages 609–6012. IEEE Press.

Follett, D. (2001). Distributed storage networking architectures: fibre channel, iscsi, ethernet, infiniband, hyper transport, rapid io and 3gio collide in the data center. In IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, 2001. NCA 2001., page 159.

Gerdelan, A., Johnson, M., and Messom, C. (2007). Performance analysis of virtualised head nodes utilising cost-effective network attached storage. In Proceedings of the Asian Particle Accelerator Conference.

Hopkins, S. and Coile, B. (2001). Ata over ethernet specification. [link].

LoBue, M. T., Mason, H., Hammond-Doel, T., Anderson, E., Alexenko, M., and Clark, T. (2002). Surveying today’s most popular storage interfaces. Computer, 35(12):48–55.

Satran, J., Meth, K., Sapuntzakis, C., Chadalapaka, M., and Zeidner, E. (2004). Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI). RFC 3720 (Proposed Standard). Updated by RFCs 3980, 4850, 5048.

Tan, Y., Jin, J., Cao, Y., and Zhu, L. (2005). A high-throughput fibre channel data communication service. In Sixth International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies., pages 975–978.

Voruganti, K. and Sarkar, P. (2001). An analysis of three gigabit networking protocols for storage area networks. In IEEE International Conference on Performance, Computing, and Communications, 2001., pages 259–265.

Zhou, C. and Chuang, H. (2009). A performance analysis of the aoe protocol. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Wireless communications, networking and mobile computing, pages 3938–3941. IEEE Press.
Published
2012-07-16
ROCHA, Pedro Eugênio; SANTOS, Leonardo Antônio dos. An Experimental Performance Analysis of AoE and iSCSI Storage Protocols. In: INTEGRATED SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE SEMINAR (SEMISH), 39. , 2012, Curitiba/PR. Anais [...]. Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação, 2012 . p. 212-223. ISSN 2595-6205.