Switch-based acceleration of computer data storage employing aggregations of disk arrays

Abstract

There is disclosed apparatus and methodology for enhancing computer system data transfer when writing to network attached storage systems employing FC-2 fibrechannel protocol by dynamically reconfiguring a fibrechannel switch in response to map/unmap command controls issued by a disk drive aggregator. The reconfiguration involves fabrication of a dynamic map table having sets of fibrechannel FC-2 header fields and their corresponding new or proxy destination IDs (which correspond to the switch's output ports), and fabrication of both an input frame header buffer for temporary storage purposes and a frame header field selector (which can be a frame header mask) containing only relevant information. The input frame header is temporarily stored in the buffer and the field selector is used to obtain a “distilled” input header which is compared with the dynamic map table of stored header fields to obtain a match. If one of the sets of header fields matches the distilled input header, its corresponding proxy destination or source ID is substituted into the corresponding FC-2 input frame header's destination ID field, whereby write command data transfers are accomplished between host computer and a particular disk drive directly, avoiding the aggregator and latency otherwise introduced by the aggregator. Similar disclosure is provided for read command data.