``Scalable Sharing of Wide Area Storage Resources''

Micah Beck, Terry Moore and James S. Plank.

Technical Report CS-02-475, University of Tennessee Department of Computer Science, January, 2002.

Available via anonymous ftp to cs.utk.edu in pub/plank/papers/CS-02-475.pdf

Abstract

There are two approaches to synthesizing IP and storage technologies, one (Logistical Networking) that changes the underlying model of storage and another (Storage Networking) that doesn't. Whatever the novelty value of the unorthodox paradigm might be, it currently exists only as research papers, open source software, and a testbed deployment. Given the fact that the Storage Networking approach to IP/Storage integration seems to be rapidly becoming a technological and industry juggernaut, it might, therefore, seem doubful that the Logistical Networking approach could have any effect on the course that such integration will take. On the other hand, the very drive to augment or replace Storage Networking's interconnection fabric with IP-based technology illustrates a pattern that the rise of the Interned has repeatedly exhibited: approaches that can scale to the wide-area tend to change, and ultimately supplant, those that cannot. In this paper we describe the Logistical Networking model of network storage, which we believe will, if successful, affect the synthesis of IP and Storage Networking in a similar way.

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