PACKET CLASSIFICATION IN A STORAGE SYSTEM

摘要

A storage switch (304) in accordance with an embodiment of the invention is a highly scalable switch that allows the creation of a SAN that is easy to deploy and that can be centrally managed. Moreover, such a storage switch also allows the deployment of a global infrastructure, allowing the resources of the SAN, such as storage devices (306), to essentially be positioned anywhere on the globe. To further enable wire-speed processing, a switch in accordance with the invention has "intelligence" distributed to each of its linecards, through which it classifies packets into data and control packets, and performs virtualization functions. A switch in accordance with the invention further performs serverless storage services such as mirroring, snapshot, and replication.