Patent Application
20220345406
The present disclosure relates generally to information handling system. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to retrieve congestion configuration information.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use, such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Congestion spreading is a very common problem in lossless (e.g., Fibre Channel (FC)) networks. Congestion spreading typically happens when a host attempts to read data from storage at a rate that is greater than the host can consume. This may occur when a host bus adapter (HBA) port is attached to a Storage Area Network (SAN) at a slower speed than the array is connected. For example, a host HBA speed may be at 8 GB/s and a target array speed may be at 16 GB/s. While in this configuration, if the host transmits READ IOs (Input/Output) at a rate that results in more than 8 GB/s being returned to the host, the result would be frames being queued in the fabric. These queued frames may congest the switch port and would also start to buildup on any inter switch links (ISLs) in a data path. When this happens, the fabric starts getting congested and other hosts connected to the same fabric also experience IO delays. This would eventually affect the IO performance of other hosts, and the entire fabric may become congested. Hosts running IOs do not know the reason of congestion in the fabric. All hosts may start to have IO performance drop. This problem is generally referred to as congestion spreading due to over-subscription.
Accordingly, it is highly desirable to find efficient ways to retrieve congestion configuration information automatically from a centralized repository for problem solving.
References will be made to embodiments of the disclosure, examples of which may be illustrated in the accompanying figures. These figures are intended to be illustrative, not limiting. Although the accompanying disclosure is generally described in the context of these embodiments, it should be understood that it is not intended to limit the scope of the disclosure to these particular embodiments. Items in the figures may not be to scale.
In the following description, for purposes of explanation, specific details are set forth in order to provide an understanding of the disclosure. It will be apparent, however, to one skilled in the art that the disclosure can be practiced without these details. Furthermore, one skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments of the present disclosure, described below, may be implemented in a variety of ways, such as a process, an apparatus, a system/device, or a method on a tangible computer-readable medium.
Components, or modules, shown in diagrams are illustrative of exemplary embodiments of the disclosure and are meant to avoid obscuring the disclosure. It shall also be understood that throughout this discussion that components may be described as separate functional units, which may comprise sub-units, but those skilled in the art will recognize that various components, or portions thereof, may be divided into separate components or may be integrated together, including, for example, being in a single system or component. It should be noted that functions or operations discussed herein may be implemented as components. Components may be implemented in software, hardware, or a combination thereof.
Furthermore, connections between components or systems within the figures are not intended to be limited to direct connections. Rather, data between these components may be modified, re-formatted, or otherwise changed by intermediary components. Also, additional or fewer connections may be used. It shall also be noted that the terms “coupled,” “connected,” “communicatively coupled,” “interfacing,” “interface,” or any of their derivatives shall be understood to include direct connections, indirect connections through one or more intermediary devices, and wireless connections. It shall also be noted that any communication, such as a signal, response, reply, acknowledgement, message, query, etc., may comprise one or more exchanges of information.
Reference in the specification to “one or more embodiments,” “preferred embodiment,” “an embodiment,” “embodiments,” or the like means that a particular feature, structure, characteristic, or function described in connection with the embodiment is included in at least one embodiment of the disclosure and may be in more than one embodiment. Also, the appearances of the above-noted phrases in various places in the specification are not necessarily all referring to the same embodiment or embodiments.
The use of certain terms in various places in the specification is for illustration and should not be construed as limiting. The terms “include,” “including,” “comprise,” and “comprising” shall be understood to be open terms and any examples are provided by way of illustration and shall not be used to limit the scope of this disclosure.
A service, function, or resource is not limited to a single service, function, or resource; usage of these terms may refer to a grouping of related services, functions, or resources, which may be distributed or aggregated. The use of memory, database, information base, data store, tables, hardware, cache, and the like may be used herein to refer to system component or components into which information may be entered or otherwise recorded. The terms “data,” “information,” along with similar terms, may be replaced by other terminologies referring to a group of one or more bits, and may be used interchangeably. The terms “packet” or “frame” shall be understood to mean a group of one or more bits. The term “frame” shall not be interpreted as limiting embodiments of the present invention to Layer 2 networks; and, the term “packet” shall not be interpreted as limiting embodiments of the present invention to Layer 3 networks. The terms “packet,” “frame,” “data,” or “data traffic” may be replaced by other terminologies referring to a group of bits, such as “datagram” or “cell.” The words “optimal,” “optimize,” “optimization,” and the like refer to an improvement of an outcome or a process and do not require that the specified outcome or process has achieved an “optimal” or peak state.
It shall be noted that: (1) certain steps may optionally be performed; (2) steps may not be limited to the specific order set forth herein; (3) certain steps may be performed in different orders; and (4) certain steps may be done concurrently.
Any headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and shall not be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. Each reference/document mentioned in this patent document is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
It shall be noted that any examples and results provided herein are provided by way of illustration and were performed under specific conditions using a specific embodiment or embodiments; accordingly, neither these experiments nor their results shall be used to limit the scope of the disclosure of the current patent document.
It shall also be noted that although embodiments described herein may be within the context of retrieving congestion configuration information in SANs, aspects of the present disclosure are not so limited. Accordingly, the aspects of the present disclosure may be applied or adapted for use in other contexts.
Congestion spreading is a very common problem in lossless, e.g., FC, networks. Congestion spreading typically happens when a host attempts to read data from storage at a rate that is greater than it can consume. This can occur when a HBA port is attached to a SAN at a slower speed than the array is connected. For example, a host HBA speed may be at 8 GB/s and a target array speed may be at 16 GB/s. While in this configuration, if the host transmits READ IOs at a rate that would result in more than 8 GB/s being returned to the host, the result would be frames being queued in the fabric. These queued frames may congest the switch port and would also start buildup on any ISLs in a data path. When this happens, the fabric starts getting congested and other hosts connected to the same fabric starts getting IO delay. This would eventually affect the IO performance of other hosts and the entire fabric may become congested. Hosts running IOs do not know the reason of congestion in the fabric. All hosts may start to have IO performance drop. This problem is generally referred to as congestion spreading due to over-subscription.
One mechanism that may be used to address this type of issue in an FC network is for the fabric to notify an end device that is causing congestion spreading via either a Fabric Performance Impact Notification-Congestion Notification (FPIN-CN) or a congestion signal. The FPIN-CN is a standards-based Extended Link Service (ELS) request sent from a switch to an end device that is causing congestion. The congestion signal is a primitive sequence that is also sent from the fabric to the end device. It shall be noted that the reason for two defined mechanisms is related to the fact that ELS requests cannot be transmitted from the fabric to the end device when congestion is present, but a primitive sequence can.
Congestion notifications and signals are intended to be consumed by end devices and impact how much of a load they are putting onto the fabric. The problem associated with using this approach to remediate congestion spreading is two-fold as described below.
First, this approach does not clearly define how the end devices should react to the reception of congestion notification. Should the end devices do nothing? Cut the number of READ requests by 10%, 50%?, Failover? Such a lack of clarity may be an issue because currently all end devices will react to congestion notification events in independent ways. The reaction may be not only a function of implementation but also how the end devices have been configured by default.
Second, this approach brings an issue of how the above configuration decision is communicated to the end devices without requiring each fabric switch to communicate directly to each end device. This is especially a problem because currently the only configuration mechanisms available are either: 1) a user would need to configure each end device manually, or 2) making use of a vendor specific tunneling mechanism that is not interoperable across HBAs of different types nor across end device types (e.g., Hosts and Storages).
Currently, to the extent that such information is distributed, it would be distributed to end devices via HBA vendor-specific interfaces. This drastically reduces the usefulness of the fabric notification concept by requiring users to individually configure each HBA type, if it were even supported or supportable.
In addition to congestion notification events, there may be other types of fabric performance impact notifications, e.g., Link Integrity events (FPIN-LI). These FPIN-LI events are generated by the fabric when an unreliable (e.g., high bit error rate (BER)) link is detected. High BER links may be very disruptive and require immediate remediation.
To the extent any solutions to configure congestion reaction behavior of end devices of a FC fabric exist, they are inefficient, cumbersome, and unscalable. One might be able to go to every host and configure the hosts manually (if it could support such as feature), which requires a lot of coordination and time, or one might be able to set up a Management Orchestration Framework (MOF). However, for the MOF approach, a plug-in or adaptor may be needed for every device type to be communicated with, which may not exist or be supported or supportable by the device. Consequently, the fabric network needs to deal with a cross of multiple adaptors as well as devices that the adaptors can possibly support, which creates at least an n×m scale problem.
The present patent document discloses embodiments of a distributed Congestion Control Service that uses existing Fibre Channel services and existing communication paths to distribute congestion control actions at various times, such as login and any time configuration parameters change as indicated via the reception of a registered state change notification (RSCN). Congestion configuration parameters may be provided to end devices in a transport agnostic way. Embodiments of the present disclosure may be applied to Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) or Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), for example. Furthermore, congestion control actions may be delivered on-demand and after a change, and specific triggers for sending a congestion control action or message may be set by a user.
In one or more embodiments, the fabric resident service may provide congestion configuration parameters for end devices upon request, and may drive consistency across all devices that are attached to the fabric. A centralized fabric service, whether instantiated as a well-known address in FC or as a part of Centralized Discovery Controller (CDC) implementation (e.g., NVMe-oF/TCP, where NVMe-oF means Nonvolatile Memory Express over Fabrics), congestion configuration parameters may be provided to end devices and therefore, the end devices may operate in the same way or a coordinated way when a congestion event happens. Furthermore, embodiments of the present disclosure eliminate the need to setup a MOF, therefore simplify the structure of the FC fabric.
In one or more embodiments, the congestion control service 130 may contain a congestion control configuration database 140 for storing congestion control information that may be distributed among the plurality of switches within the FC fabric 110. In one or more embodiment, the congestion control configuration database 140 is a table that comprises a plurality of rows of data entries in columns (e.g., three columns).
Table 1 lists some exemplary entries in a congestion control configuration database. The first column is a type column defining an event type that an end device may receive. Exemplary entries in the type column may be FPIN-CN (indicating an event for congestion notification) or FPIN-LI (indicating an event for link integrity). The second column, also referred as a “RX by” column shown in
In the beginning of the sequences is a login process, as shown in
In step 405, the end device sends a fabric login (FLOGI) request to the switch for fabric login service at a first well-known address (e.g., FFFFFE) on the switch, and the switch sends an FLOGI accept (FLOGI ACC) frame with a fabric address assigned to the end device for confirmation. The fabric login is performed between a node port (N-port) and a fabric port (F-port).
In step 410, the end device sends a first port login (PLOGI) request to a second well-known address (e.g., FFFFFC) on the switch for name server (NS) service, and the switch sends a first PLOGI accept (PLOGI ACC) frame to the end device for confirmation. The port login is performed between an N_Port and a fabric service or another N_Port in order to establish a session. The port login may be necessary such that any upper level communication may happen. During the port login process, the switch may write the information of the end device to the name server.
In step 415 (corresponding to the event 305 in
In step 420, the end device sends a state change registration (SCR) request to a fourth well-known address (e.g., FFFFD) on the switch for Fabric Controller service in order to receive an RSCN every time the fabric has a change, and the switch sends a SCR ACC frame to the end device for confirmation.
As described in accordance with
In step 440 (corresponding to the event 312 in
In step 445, the end device establishes or updates its reaction behavior or profile based on information in the received congestion control response, as illustrated in block 314 in
In one or more embodiments, the congestion control configuration database may be updated. The update may be implemented by a fabric administrator periodically or dynamically (e.g., in response to a Fabric event). Updates may be distributed automatically. Update of the congestion control configuration database may be implemented to improve overall fabric performance using machine learning algorithms. For example, for an FPIN-CN notification, an associated initiator action may be updated from “reduce READ request by 50%” into “reduce READ request by 10%”, if the fabric determines that a 10% reduction is adequate to handle a network congestion.
In step 450 (corresponding to the event 320 in
In one or more embodiments, aspects of the present patent document may be directed to, may include, or may be implemented on one or more information handling systems (or computing systems). An information handling system/computing system may include any instrumentality or aggregate of instrumentalities operable to compute, calculate, determine, classify, process, transmit, receive, retrieve, originate, route, switch, store, display, communicate, manifest, detect, record, reproduce, handle, or utilize any form of information, intelligence, or data. For example, a computing system may be or may include a personal computer (e.g., laptop), tablet computer, mobile device (e.g., personal digital assistant (PDA), smart phone, phablet, tablet, etc.), smart watch, server (e.g., blade server or rack server), a network storage device, camera, or any other suitable device and may vary in size, shape, performance, functionality, and price. The computing system may include random access memory (RAM), one or more processing resources such as a central processing unit (CPU) or hardware or software control logic, read only memory (ROM), and/or other types of memory. Additional components of the computing system may include one or more disk drives, one or more network ports for communicating with external devices as well as various input and output (I/O) devices, such as a keyboard, mouse, stylus, touchscreen, and/or video display. The computing system may also include one or more buses operable to transmit communications between the various hardware components.
As illustrated in
A number of controllers and peripheral devices may also be provided, as shown in
In the illustrated system, all major system components may connect to a bus 516, which may represent more than one physical bus. However, various system components may or may not be in physical proximity to one another. For example, input data and/or output data may be remotely transmitted from one physical location to another. In addition, programs that implement various aspects of the disclosure may be accessed from a remote location (e.g., a server) over a network. Such data and/or programs may be conveyed through any of a variety of machine-readable medium including, for example: magnetic media such as hard disks, floppy disks, and magnetic tape; optical media such as CD-ROMs and holographic devices; magneto-optical media; and hardware devices that are specially configured to store or to store and execute program code, such as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs), flash memory devices, other non-volatile memory (NVM) devices (such as 3D XPoint-based devices), and ROM and RAM devices.
The information handling system 600 may include a plurality of I/O ports 605, a network processing unit (NPU) 615, one or more tables 620, and a central processing unit (CPU) 625. The system includes a power supply (not shown) and may also include other components, which are not shown for sake of simplicity.
In one or more embodiments, the I/O ports 605 may be connected via one or more cables to one or more other network devices or clients. The network processing unit 615 may use information included in the network data received at the node 600, as well as information stored in the tables 620, to identify a next device for the network data, among other possible activities. In one or more embodiments, a switching fabric may then schedule the network data for propagation through the node to an egress port for transmission to the next destination.
Aspects of the present disclosure may be encoded upon one or more non-transitory computer-readable media with instructions for one or more processors or processing units to cause steps to be performed. It shall be noted that the one or more non-transitory computer-readable media shall include volatile and/or non-volatile memory. It shall be noted that alternative implementations are possible, including a hardware implementation or a software/hardware implementation. Hardware-implemented functions may be realized using ASIC(s), programmable arrays, digital signal processing circuitry, or the like. Accordingly, the “means” terms in any claims are intended to cover both software and hardware implementations. Similarly, the term “computer-readable medium or media” as used herein includes software and/or hardware having a program of instructions embodied thereon, or a combination thereof. With these implementation alternatives in mind, it is to be understood that the figures and accompanying description provide the functional information one skilled in the art would require to write program code (i.e., software) and/or to fabricate circuits (i.e., hardware) to perform the processing required.
It shall be noted that embodiments of the present disclosure may further relate to computer products with a non-transitory, tangible computer-readable medium that have computer code thereon for performing various computer-implemented operations. The media and computer code may be those specially designed and constructed for the purposes of the present disclosure, or they may be of the kind known or available to those having skill in the relevant arts. Examples of tangible computer-readable media include, for example: magnetic media such as hard disks, floppy disks, and magnetic tape; optical media such as CD-ROMs and holographic devices; magneto-optical media; and hardware devices that are specially configured to store or to store and execute program code, such as application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), programmable logic devices (PLDs), flash memory devices, other non-volatile memory (NVM) devices (such as 3D XPoint-based devices), and ROM and RAM devices. Examples of computer code include machine code, such as produced by a compiler, and files containing higher level code that are executed by a computer using an interpreter. Embodiments of the present disclosure may be implemented in whole or in part as machine-executable instructions that may be in program modules that are executed by a processing device. Examples of program modules include libraries, programs, routines, objects, components, and data structures. In distributed computing environments, program modules may be physically located in settings that are local, remote, or both.
One skilled in the art will recognize no computing system or programming language is critical to the practice of the present disclosure. One skilled in the art will also recognize that a number of the elements described above may be physically and/or functionally separated into modules and/or sub-modules or combined together.
It will be appreciated to those skilled in the art that the preceding examples and embodiments are exemplary and not limiting to the scope of the present disclosure. It is intended that all permutations, enhancements, equivalents, combinations, and improvements thereto that are apparent to those skilled in the art upon a reading of the specification and a study of the drawings are included within the true spirit and scope of the present disclosure. It shall also be noted that elements of any claims may be arranged differently including having multiple dependencies, configurations, and combinations.
