Analysis of performance comparison between Software-Based iSCSI SAN and Hardware-Based iSCSI SAN

Abstract Nowadays computer data grows rapidly and make a lot of institutions and companies looking for storage solutions that are safe, reliable and trustworthy. One of the solutions is to implement a Storage Area Network (SAN). In this study, the authors chose the iSCSI protocol as an object for analyzing the performance of the SAN server based on software and hardware. The RAID type used are RAID 5 and RAID 10, while the parameters used are Input Output per Second (IOPS), throughput and average latency with workloads 4 KB, 8 KB, and 256 KB. The tests performed on the network running Link Aggregation (LAG) or network without LAG. From the test results, it is seen that a SAN network running LAG have increased throughput by 89.57 MBps. The best IOPS performance was achieved by Software-Based iSCSI SAN with a value of 26729.48 IOPS. The best throughput performance is achieved by Hardware-Based iSCSI SAN with a value of 118.55MBps. The best latency performance achieved by Software-Based iSCSI SAN with a value of 2.01ms.