Analysis of iSCSI short blocks access

The development of IP-SAN is expected to be scalable and cost-effective SAN, and iSCSI is also the expected data transfer protocol of IP-SAN. In this paper, we have provided a detailed analysis of iSCSI storage accesses with short blocks. First, we show turn-around times of short block iSCSI storage accesses with several iSCSI implementations. We found that the differences among the implementations are significantly large. Second, we analyze these iSCSI implementations using our analysis system and elaborately explain that performance degradation is caused by the combination of iSCSI, TCP/IP, and Ethernet.