A Virtual Storage System Building on IP Networks

This paper presents a virtual network storage system bwVSDS which is built by using the IP-SAN technology. Compared with the conventional network storage systems, bwVSDS has the following features: firstly, it adopts a layered storage virtualization approach to ease the storage management, secondly, it realizes various advanced data storage semantics inside the intelligent networked storage devices, thirdly, it combines the in-band storage management and out-of-band direct data access to maximize the bandwidth of switched network fabrics and capabilities of the networked storage devices. bwVSDS has now been deployed in various IT fields. The real experiences show that it can not only reduce the TCO of a large-scale storage system, but also satisfies the ever rising requirement on the storage performance.