Small Computer System Interface is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interfaces. The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types; the presence of "unknown" as one of these types means that in theory it can be used as an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and addressed toward commercial requirements. The initial Parallel SCSI was most commonly used for hard disk drives and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives, although not all controllers can handle all devices.
In computing, iSCSI is an acronym for Internet Small Computer Systems Interface, an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking standard for linking data storage facilities. It provides block-level access to storage devices by carrying SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. iSCSI is used to facilitate data transfers over intranets and to manage storage over long distances. It can be used to transmit data over local area networks (LANs), wide area networks (WANs), or the Internet and can enable location-independent data storage and retrieval.
InfiniBand (IB) is a computer networking communications standard used in high-performance computing that features very high throughput and very low latency. It is used for data interconnect both among and within computers. InfiniBand is also used as either a direct or switched interconnect between servers and storage systems, as well as an interconnect between storage systems. It is designed to be scalable and uses a switched fabric network topology.
Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers in storage area networks (SAN) in commercial data centers.
Serial ATA is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard to become the predominant interface for storage devices.
In computing, the Windows Sockets API (WSA), later shortened to Winsock, is a technical specification that defines how Windows network application software should access network services, especially TCP/IP. It defines a standard interface between a Windows TCP/IP client application and the underlying TCP/IP protocol stack. The nomenclature is based on the Berkeley sockets API model used in BSD for communications between programs.
The disk controller is the controller circuit which enables the CPU to communicate with a hard disk, floppy disk or other kind of disk drive. It also provides an interface between the disk drive and the bus connecting it to the rest of the system.
In computer hardware, a host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA) connects a computer, which acts as the host system, to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, Fibre Channel and SATA devices. Devices for connecting to IDE, Ethernet, FireWire, USB and other systems may also be called host adapters.
The small form-factor pluggable (SFP) is a compact, hot-pluggable network interface module used for both telecommunication and data communications applications. An SFP interface on networking hardware is a modular slot for a media-specific transceiver in order to connect a fiber-optic cable or sometimes a copper cable. The advantage of using SFPs compared to fixed interfaces is that individual ports can be equipped with any suitable type of transceiver as needed.
In the computer storage field, a Fibre Channel switch is a network switch compatible with the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. It allows the creation of a Fibre Channel fabric, that is the core component of a storage area network (SAN). The fabric is a network of Fibre Channel devices which allows many-to-many communication, device name lookup, security, and redundancy. FC switches implement zoning, a mechanism that disables unwanted traffic between certain fabric nodes.
The Storage Management Initiative Specification, commonly called SMI-S, is a computer data storage management standard developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). It has also been ratified as an ISO standard. SMI-S is based upon the Common Information Model and the Web-Based Enterprise Management standards defined by the Distributed Management Task Force, which define management functionality via HTTP. The most recent approved version of SMI-S is available on the SNIA website.
Serial general purpose input/output (SGPIO) is a four-signal bus used between a host bus adapter (HBA) and a backplane. Of the four signals, three are driven by the HBA and one by the backplane. Typically, the HBA is a storage controller located inside a server, desktop, rack or workstation computer that interfaces with hard disk drives or solid state drives to store and retrieve data. It is considered an extension of the general-purpose input/output (GPIO) concept.
ATTO Technology, Inc. is a manufacturer of storage connectivity products for data-intensive computing. ATTO manufactures Fibre Channel and SAS/SATA host bus adapters, RAID adapters, Fibre Channel switches, protocol conversion bridges, storage controllers, MacOS iSCSI initiator software and acceleration software with storage interface connectivity to SATA, SAS, Fibre Channel, Thunderbolt devices, Ethernet and NVMe.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks while preserving the Fibre Channel protocol. The specification was part of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards T11 FC-BB-5 standard published in 2009.
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access data storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries from servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as direct-attached storage. A SAN typically is a dedicated network of storage devices not accessible through the local area network (LAN).
NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The acronym NVM stands for non-volatile memory, which is often NAND flash memory that comes in several physical form factors, including solid-state drives (SSDs), PCI Express (PCIe) add-in cards and M.2 cards, the successor to mSATA cards. NVM Express, as a logical-device interface, has been designed to capitalize on the low latency and internal parallelism of solid-state storage devices.
In computing, Linux-IO (LIO) Target is an open-source implementation of the SCSI target that has become the standard one included in the Linux kernel. Internally, LIO does not initiate sessions, but instead provides one or more Logical Unit Numbers (LUNs), waits for SCSI commands from a SCSI initiator, and performs required input/output data transfers. LIO supports common storage fabrics, including FCoE, Fibre Channel, IEEE 1394, iSCSI, iSCSI Extensions for RDMA (iSER), SCSI RDMA Protocol (SRP) and USB. It is included in most Linux distributions; native support for LIO in QEMU/KVM, libvirt, and OpenStack makes LIO also a storage option for cloud deployments.
A converged network adapter (CNA), also called a converged network interface controller (C-NIC), is a computer input/output device that combines the functionality of a host bus adapter (HBA) with a network interface controller (NIC). In other words, it "converges" access to, respectively, a storage area network and a general-purpose computer network.
In an enterprise server, a Caching SAN Adapter is a host bus adapter (HBA) for storage area network (SAN) connectivity which accelerates performance by transparently storing duplicate data such that future requests for that data can be serviced faster compared to retrieving the data from the source. A caching SAN adapter is used to accelerate the performance of applications across multiple clustered or virtualized servers and uses DRAM, NAND Flash or other memory technologies as the cache. The key requirement for the memory technology is that it is faster than the media storing the original copy of the data to ensure performance acceleration is achieved.
Storage security is a specialty area of security that is concerned with securing data storage systems and ecosystems and the data that resides on these systems.
