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Technique

The following figure shows the protocol hierarchy that is being implemented in the SimSANs toolkit, which is composed of four protocol domains:

SANs Protocol Hierarchy

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SCSI Domain (partially available in v2.0.12)
SCSI domain implements command protocols including disk relevant commands (SBC-2), RAID relevant commands (SCC-2), tape relevant commands (SSC-2), and common commands for all devices (SPC-2). SAM-2, the SCSI architecture model, defines the generic requirements that pertain to SCSI implementation standards as well as the low layer transport protocols (FCP, iFCP, iSCSI, etc) and interconnect protocols (FC, GbE, IP, etc). SCSI domain resides on top of either Fibre Channel SANs domain or IP SANs domain. Please refer to Technical Committee T10.

Fibre Channel SANs Domain (available in v2.0.12)
Fibre Channel SANs domain implements FC signaling, framing, link, and physical protocols for N_Ports (in hosts or devices) and F_Port/E_Port (in switches). SimSANs chooses FCP-2, Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI, as data transport protocol, which is implemented as SCSI FCP driver for host bus adaptor (HBA). Please refer to Technical Committee T11 for Fibre Channel and Technical Committee T10 for FCP-2.

IP SANs Domain (not available in current SimSANs)
SimSANs toolkit will implement two protocol models for IP SANs: iFCP for extending Fibre Channel SANs over IP networks, and iSCSI for building IP SANs. Both protocols use TCP as transport layer protocol and IP as network layer protocol. Either Gigabit Ethernet (GbE: IEEE 802.3z) or 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE: IEEE 802.3ae) is chosen as the data link layer protocol. GbE or 10GbE can be found in IEEE 802.3 Working Group while iFCP, iSCSI, as well as TCP/IP relevant protocols can be found in IETF - the Internet Engineering Task Force.

SANs Extension Domain (not available in current SimSANs)
The concept of SANs extension here denotes the extension or inter-connection of the Fibre Channel SANs and/or the IP SANs over high speed WAN links such as ATM or optical networks like SONET or DWDM. Relevant protocols can be found in ATM Forum and ITU-T.

This page was last updated 2003.10.15