Snins: A Storage Network Integrating NAS and SAN

With the digital information and application requirement on the Internet increasing fleetly nowadays it is urgent to work out an network storage system with a large capacity, a high availability and scalability. To solve the above-mentioned issues, a Storage Network Integrating NAS and SAN (for short SNINS) has been designed. Firstly, the SNINS integrates multi-NAS iNAS (a iSCSI-based NAS), enterprise SAN with the help of storage virtualization, which can provide a greater capacity and better scalability; secondly, the SNINS can provide high availability with the help of detecting mechanism and redundancy technologies; thirdly, the SNINS simultaneously serves for both the file I/O and the block I/O with the help of an iSCSI module, which integrates NAS and SAN in the same storage pool; finally, the SNINS can provide higher I/O speed by a high network-attached channel which implements the direct data transfer between the storage device and client. In the experiments, the SNINS has ultra-high-throughput for both of the file I/O requests and the block I/O requests.