STREAMING METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR FIBRE CHANNEL NETWORK DEVICES

摘要

A system and method for processing commands to network target devices (56) through an SCSI router (54) in a Fibre Channel network (10) having a plurali ty of Fibre Channel hosts (52). The system and method are implemented in the SC SI router and include receiving a command from one of the hosts and, if the command is for a transfer of data larger than a threshold size, streaming th e data to the target device. When a presize memory block is free, a data block is requested from the Fibre Channel host that issued the command. The SCSI router receives data blocks and stores them in a FIFO queue until an initial number of data blocks are stored in the FIFO queue. Data blocks are then forwarded to the target device until a trigger number of blocks remain in th e queue. Additional data blocks are requested and received from the host simultaneously with the forwarding of data blocks to the target device. The target device requests data blocks from the SCSI router until all of the dat a associated with the command has been transferred.