Prf. Dr. Frank Bellosa

Abstract:

The development of technologies facilitating spatial separation of storage subsystems and their responsible computational resources is in increasing manner subject to recent commercial and scientic research. While most existing solutions relate to the SCSI (Small Computers System Interface) standard, resulting in a high degree of universality, from an end-user's point of view there is, however, a lack of dedicated support for remote optical storage. Although CD/DVD recorders typically behave as standard SCSI multimedia device, specic requirements for this class of devices (e.g., timely arrival of command blocks) have to be taken into account, especially when considering scenarios of distributed deployment; that is, host computer and target device reside in separate locations connected by a common network interconnect. The objective of this work is to remedy missing support by the development of a viable solution under the main premise of an inexpensive application among end-users.

This thesis describes an approach, which allows the transmission of ASPI (Advanced SCSI Programming Interface) requests across an IP-based network. To accomplish transparent usage of remote devices, these request blocks are tunnelled over a transport layer connection, which means being serialized and enveloped by an appropriate packet header and trailer. In addition to this functionality, the designed protocol includes supplementary mechanisms in respect of extensibility and future enhancements, turning it into a generic framework for the given task at the same time. The solution's accompanying implementation demonstrates feasibility (proof-ofconcept) in general and correct operation of the elaborated protocol design in both single-threaded and multi-threaded application.

BibTex:

@studythesis{lieder06aspioverip,
  author = {Johannes Lieder},
  title = {Advanced SCSI Programming Interface over Internet Protocol},
  type = {Study Thesis},
  address = {System Architecture Group, University of Karlsruhe, Germany},
  month = feb # "~27",
  year = 2006,
  url = {http://i30www.ira.uka.de/teaching/theses/pasttheses/}
}