Back-up White Papers

Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) - A Technical Overview

• Tags:
• back-up,
• discovery,
• device,
• attached

Overview As the repositories of information that sustain institutions and enterprises, storage devices are at the center of modern network designs. Unlike hosts in a typical data communication network, storage devices do not initiate transactions. In the vocabulary of storage administration, storage devices are targets, responding to read and write requests from initiators such as servers or workstations. In direct SCSI-attached storage configurations, a server can easily discover the storage resources at its disposal by polling the SCSI bus to which disk arrays are attached. Since the server is the exclusive owner of its attached storage, it can be assumed that any devices it discovers are available for its use.

In a storage area network (SAN), by contrast, disk and tape resources may be dispersed across a complex network. This situation presents challenges for device discovery as well as device ownership. Initiators must be able to identify storage resources in the SAN and determine whether they have access to them. SANs therefore require a mechanism to facilitate device discovery and to assign potentially shared storage resources to specific initiators. iSNS facilitates device discovery in Fibre Channel storage area networks and in IP Storage Networks.

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