VISA: a virtual interface storage architecture for improved network performance

Virtual interface (VI) architecture provides user-level communication with high delivered bandwidth and low latency. It shortens the path of data transfer and reduces the software overhead between a high performance CPU/memory subsystem and a high performance network. Virtual interface storage architecture (VISA) is a new network storage system that uses VI as the network communication protocol to take advantage of VFs superior performance over TCP/IP in local area networks. VISA is composed of many storage server nodes, metadata server(s) and some client nodes and has good expansibility that allows storage nodes and client nodes to be dynamically inserted into the VISA system. Experiments conducted on a VISA prototype show that replacing TCP/IP with VI can increase the effective bandwidth and reduce the network latency. Our analysis shows that VISA outperforms TCP/IP-based system in network transfer latency as physical bandwidth increases.