Abstract:
With the current trend toward centralised storage, storage area networks
are becoming a critical part of commercial computer networks. In this paper
we present a formal definition of the storage area network design problem.
We summarise an approach from Hewlett-Packard Laboratories for solving
this problem that considers all possible network components and uses mixed-
integer programming to select a design. We also summarise a preprocessing
method that significantly reduces the size of this formulation. We then present
a new formulation that uses generic components instead of including all pos-
sible components. We modify the preprocessing method to provide an cost
function for the generic components. The size of our generic formulation is
a significant reduction from the size of the Hewlett-Packard formulation. We
compare the two formulations using a small example storage area network
design problem.