Fujitsu has announced the development of technology for software-defined networking (SDN) that controls storage-traffic routing and claims to improves throughput on networks with integrated LAN and SAN(1) networks.
With an increasing priority on efficient system operations in datacenters in recent years, network switches are being controlled remotely and externally through software controllers, and such SDN technology that uses virtualised networks has come into use. In addition, there has been a trend toward integrating LANs and SANs to reduce costs and simplify operations. This is where Fujitsu hope its technology developments come into play.
Existing SDN technologies have been designed for LAN switches and cannot be used to optimise SAN storage traffic. When applied to converged LAN and SAN networks, this has created a barrier to performance improvements for attempting to expand systems.
Fujitsu Laboratories has equipped a network switch with the functions needed to control storage traffic, and by controlling that switch from the external controller, has made it possible to control the routing of storage traffic by SDN while effectively virtualising network resources. A development environment for a LAN and SAN converged network using this technology has demonstrated that performance roughly doubled, Fujitsu said.
In the future, it is predicted that this technology will make it possible for systems to expand flexibly in response to loads on converged LAN and SAN networks in vertically integrated platforms for virtualisation and cloud computing.
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