On Performance of Parallel iSCSI Protocol for Networked Storage Systems

A newly emerging protocol for storage networking, iSCSI [1,2], was recently ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force [3]. The iSCSI protocol is perceived as a low cost alternative to the FC protocol for networked storages [5,6,7,8]. It allows block level storage data to be transported over the popular TCP/IP network that is widely understood. This paper presents a new storage architecture allowing parallel processing of iSCSI packets. By leveraging inexpensive Ethernet ports, we are able to greatly improve the throughput of iSCSI storages through parallel processing. We have carried out a performance analysis to evaluate the performance of the new architecture as compared to the existing iSCSI storages. Our numerical results show that the new architecture has good performance potential.