Design and implementation of SCSI target emulator

A SCSI target emulator is used in a storage area network (SAN) environment to simulate the behavior of a SCSI target for processing and responding to lID requests issued by initiators. The SCSI target emulator works with general storage devices with multiple transport protocols. The target emulator utilizes a protocol conversion module that translates the SCSI protocols to a variety of storage devices and implements the multi-RAID-Ievel configuration and storage visualization functions. Moreover, the target emulator implements RAM caching, multi-queuing, and request merging to effectively improve the lID response speed of the general storage devices. The throughput and average response times of the target emulator for block sizes of 4 KB to 128 KB are 1500/0 faster for reads and 670/0 faster for writes than the existing emulator. With a block size of 16 KB, the lID latency of the target emulator is only about 200/0 that of the existing emulator.