RE: Towards Consensus on TCP Connections

[Black_David@emc.com]

> I do not think that such contentious statements are useful.

Can we calm down a bit -- or at least leave refereeing attempts
to folks like the co-chairs and ADs?  Thanks in advance.

It is the case that Douglas Otis's statement to which John Hufferd
objected is seriously at odds with industry practice --

> If you wish to use this interface at a controller, it should
> assume an identical role to a device.

Even disk arrays that are all-Fibre Channel are often using FC-SW
(switched) to talk to servers and FC-AL (arbitrated loop) to talk to drives.
There are disk array products with Fibre Channel interfaces to servers
that use SCSI and even SSA drives.  Most mainframes still use ESCON
as their storage interface, even though there hasn't been an ESCON
disk drive produced for many years.

So, I think the onus is on Douglas to explain why uniformity of controller
and drive interfaces should be required, given the large number of product
engineering decisions that have gone in the other direction.  After all,
this
is the Internet *Engineering* Task Force :-).

The overall discussion of whether the iSCSI protocol specification should
include both arrays and individual drives is definitely germane and in
scope for this list - there are words in the draft charter to that effect.

--David  

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David L. Black, Senior Technologist
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