Fibre Channel based Storage Area Network Modeling using OPNET for Large Fabric Simulations: Preliminary Work

Fibre channel based storage area networks have been a common implementation for data storage in enterprise data centers. As the size of the storage area network tends to grow along with geographical distribution leading to distributed storage area network, also known as large fabric, the network seems to exhibit scaling and stability issues. The scaling and stability issues seem to stem from the construction, route discovery, and management process of the network which are fibre channel-2 level traffic more than the actual I/O data transmission process. To determine the scaling and stability issues of a large fabric, an adequate tool is required. The tool is usually a discrete event simulator since an analytical or hardware simulator tool would not be able to handle the large size of the storage area network and model in detail. In this paper, the preliminary work on modeling and simulations of a fibre channel based storage area network using OPNET as a discrete event simulator are presented. As a preliminary step, the fibre channel host bus adapter and its interactions with the fabric login server of a fibre channel switch during the fabric login process is modeled at the fibre channel-2 level and preliminary simulations are performed.