Fibre Channel Switch Modeling at Fibre Channel-2 Level for Large Fabric Storage Area Network Simulations using OMNeT++: Preliminary Results

Medium sized storage area networks using fibre channel have been a common implementation for data storage in enterprise data centers. The ever increasing demand for large storage pools has paved to the idea of implementing large distributed storage area networks also known as large fabrics. The large fabrics seem to experience fabric scaling and fabric stability issues. These scaling and stability issues are related to the performance of various fabric servers of fabric services, such as fabric controller, fabric login, directory, etc., which are part of the fibre channel-2 level of the fibre channel protocol. To determine the extent of scaling and stability issues of a large fabric an adequate tool is required. The tool could be an analytical model, a hardware simulator, or a discrete event software simulator. The discrete event software simulator provides a number of benefits over the analytical model and hardware simulator. In this paper, the modeling of a fibre channel switch using the OMNeT++ discrete event simulator and simulation of large fabric are presented. As a first step, only the fibre channel-2 level of the fibre channel switch is modeled since it is the layer containing various fabric services dealing with fabric building and managing. In this paper, the process of building a fabric and managing and how it is implemented in the simulator are discussed. Also, a preliminary analysis of the results in comparison to the test bed traffic is presented showing the accuracy and representation of an actual large fabric by the simulator.