Chapter 9. Flow Control and Quality of Service

Upon completing this chapter, you will be able to:

• List all of the flow control and QoS mechanisms related to modern storage networks

• Describe the general characteristics of each of the flow control and QoS mechanisms related to modern storage networks

The chapters in Part I, "The Storage Networking Landscape," and Part II, "The OSI Layers," introduce the flow control and QoS mechanisms used in modern storage networks. Building upon those chapters, this chapter provides a comprehensive inventory of the flow control and QoS mechanisms used by Ethernet, IP, TCP, Internet SCSI (iSCSI), Fibre Channel (FC), Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), and Fibre Channel over TCP/IP (FCIP). Readers are encouraged to review the flow control and QoS discussion at the beginning of Chapter 5, "The OSI Physical and Data Link Layers," before reading this chapter. Additionally, readers are encouraged to review the frame/packet format descriptions and delivery mechanism discussions in the chapters in Part II, "The OSI Layers," before reading this chapter. Finally, readers are encouraged to review the data transfer optimization discussions in Chapter 8, "The OSI Session, Presentation, and Application Layers," before reading this chapter.