Fibre-Ribbon Switching for Application in Core-Edge Storage Area Networks

The design and construction of a shutter-based optical fibre-ribbon switch has been reported in [F.Zhang, N. Collins, W.A. Crossland, et al., (2005)] previously. In this paper, a typical application of such fibre-ribbon switch in core-edge storage area networks (SAN) is introduced. The core-edge SAN was modelled and simulated with self-similar traffic sourced from real gigabit ethernet network traces and storage system traces. The simulation investigated the relations between the spatial light modulator's (SLM) reconfigure time, cell size, inter-switch link (ISL) speed, channel number of the switched fibre ribbon with the data loss rate and the mean delay. The results show that compared with single fibre switching which is normally supported by current SAN switches, fibre-ribbon switching improves performance greatly with a simple configuration