Date of Award

Spring 2008

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

Computer Science

Degree Name

Master of Science

First Advisor

Robert Russell

Abstract

iSCSI is an emerging storage network technology that allows for block-level access to disk drives over a computer network. Since iSCSI runs over the very ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol it has many advantages over its more proprietary alternatives. Due to the recent movement toward 10 gigabit Ethernet, storage vendors are interested to see how this large increase in network bandwidth could benefit the iSCSI protocol.

In order to make full use of the bandwidth provided by a 10 gigabit Ethernet link, specialized Remote Direct Memory Access hardware is being developed to offload processing and reduce the data-copy-overhead found in a standard TCP/IP network stack. This thesis focuses on the development of an iSCSI implementation that is capable of supporting this new hardware and the evaluation of its performance.

This thesis depicts the approach used to implement the iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access (iSER) with the UNH iSCSI reference implementation. This approach involves a three step process: moving UNH-iSCSI from the Linux kernel to the Linux user-space, adding support for the iSER extensions to our user-space iSCSI and finally moving everything back into the Linux kernel. In addition to a description of the implementation, results are given that demonstrate the performance of the completed iSER-assisted iSCSI implementation.

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