ABSTRACT-
The design and construction of a shutter-based optical fibre-ribbon switch has been reported in [1] previously.
In this paper, a typical application of such fibre-ribbon switch in core-edge storage area networks (SAN) is
introduced. The core-edge SAN was modelled and simulated with self-similar traffic sourced from real Gigabit
Ethernet network traces and storage system traces. The simulation investigated the relations between the spatial
light modulator’s (SLM) reconfigure time, cell size, Inter-Switch Link (ISL) speed, channel number of the
switched fibre ribbon with the data loss rate and the mean delay. The results show that compared with single
fibre switching which is normally supported by current SAN switches, fibre-ribbon switching improves
performance greatly with a simple configuration.
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