Managing storage flows with SDN approach in I/O converged networks

The demand for efficient use of information and communication technology (ICT) resources has recently been growing. Equipment costs at datacenters have been reduced to satisfy this demand and all ICT resources have been required to be controlled on demand. Network virtualization and software defined networking (SDN) technologies have been applied to datacenter networks for the same reason. On the other hand, efficient networks and operations also need to be provided, including traditional storage systems. Ethernet fabric and I/O convergence have been applied to satisfy these requirements. However, the SDN approach has mainly been applied to local area networks and flexible control has so far not been accomplished for converged networks. We introduced an SDN approach similar to OpenFlow and applied this to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) networks, which is a method of achieving I/O converged networks. This method of controlling flows can coexist with OpenFlow based SDN flow control. We explain the differences between our method of flow control, OpenFlow, and path optimization with FCoE and their effects as examples in this paper.