RE: iSCSI: Flow Control

[Michael Krause <krause@cup.hp.com>]

At 12:34 PM 10/4/00 -0700, John Hufferd/San Jose/IBM wrote:

>Michael Krause,
>First, a session usually lasts from Boot Time till it is Booted again or
>stopped.  The variant to this is a Storage Device being used in a manor
>like a Mount or Map done with NAS.  Even then, most folks, have that setup
>so the Mounting and Mapping is done at bring up, though it is sometimes
>done at other times, but even then it is left around.  So I think the thing
>you can say about Session Time as the term is used in the iSCSI context is
>that it is LONG.
>
>I do not think we have consensus about the notification of available
>buffers.  With the way many systems work, is (as stated above), all devices
>are set up at startup of the Host, and the Session is kept around by the
>Host, even if there hasn't been anything which use that device all
>day/week, etc.  So I am not sure if having a certain amount of buffer space
>reserved for each Host (which could be 100s-1000s) would be an especially
>good idea.

I believe we are in agreement both in terms of duration and the need to 
have dynamic buffer management.  I will clarify that there will also be 
sessions that are not host focused, e.g. the peer-to-peer direction of a 
storage object to another device, e.g. multi-media streaming and these 
sessions will be shorter lived - possibly on a per transaction basis where 
a transaction is something of reasonably large in value (e.g. 100's MBs of 
data movement).

Mike