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FAST 2002 Abstract
Appia: automatic storage area network fabric design
Julie Ward, Michael O'Sullivan, Troy Shahoumian, and John Wilkes, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Abstract
Designing a storage area network (SAN) fabric requires
devising a set of hubs, switches and links to connect hosts
to their storage devices. The network must be capable
of simultaneously meeting specified data flow requirements
between multiple host-device pairs, and it must
do so cost-effectively, since large-scale SAN fabrics can
cost millions of dollars. Given that the number of data
flows can easily number in the hundreds, simple overprovisioned
manual designs are often not attractive: they
can cost significantly more than they need to, may not
meet the performance needs, may expend valuable resources
in the wrong places, and are subject to the usual
sources of human error.
Producing SAN fabric designs automatically can address
these difficulties, but it is a non-trivial problem: it
extends the NP-hard minimum-cost fixed-charge multi-commodity
network flow problem to include degree con-straints,
node capacities, node costs, unsplittable flows,
and other requirements. Nonetheless, we present here
two efficient algorithms for automatic SAN design. We
show that these produce cost-effective SAN designs in
very reasonable running times, and explore how the two
algorithms behave over a range of design problems.
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