An Analytical Performance Model of IP-SAN

In this paper we propose a component-based analytical performance model for IP-SAN. We model four key components within IP-SAN individually and they are IP network, cache, RAID and disks. We validate these component models and compose them to give an entire IP-SAN performance model. The entire IP-SAN model analyzes the performance of an IP-SAN configuration under multiple synchronous workloads by using closed queueing network model and under asynchronous workload by using open queueing network model. We also validate the entire IP-SAN performance model against a real IP-SAN system. The theoretical results are compared with the results from a real IP-SAN using a variety of synthetic workloads. These experiments prove that the component-based method is an appropriate way to build performance model for a complex storage system. To our knowledge, this is the first exploration into building analytical performance model for entire IP-SAN system and validating against a real system. We also identify areas for future research in the performance analysis of real IP-SAN.