iSCSI sessions: Step 3

[Black_David@emc.com]

A week ago, I wrote (typo corrected in the following):

> Now comes the hard part - Symmetric vs. modified
> Pure Asymmetric (modified by [5] above).  There are
> over 1000 email messages in my mailbox for the ips
> mailing list for the past two months, and I freely
> admit to not having reviewed them in detail.  I suggested
> in the "Let's try again" email that more weight should
> be given to those working on implementations, especially
> hardware, and have not seen any objections to that
> suggestion.  My impression is that the opinion of such
> people has been in favor of the Symmetric model -
> Matt Wakeley (Agilent), and Somesh Gupta (HP) come
> to mind as examples.  I'm not confident that this is
> the WG consensus, but it appears to me that the
> WG is headed in that direction.  Please comment on
> this - the absence of comments/objections will be
> taken as a sign of agreement.

The only dissenting comment I've seen to this is from
Matt Wakeley.  It appears to go against two items
of WG consensus - Matt favored *un*modified Pure Asymmetric
with support for two TCP connections per iSCSI session
REQUIRED, whereas the WG consensus appears to
be a) that only modified Pure Asymmetric is to be further
considered, and b) support for more than one TCP connection
per iSCSI session is to remain OPTIONAL.

Given the amount of heated discussion on this issue
in the past, I hesitate to call/state WG consensus at
this point in time,  but I do think it's reasonable to direct
the iSCSI specification draft authors to specify a Symmetric
model for multi-connection sessions in the next version
of the draft (and hence they should consider themselves
so directed).

When the next version of the draft appears, there will be
an opportunity for further review of this direction, including
the details that are specified (e.g., how error recovery works).
I would ask everyone to refrain from further discussion of
sessions until that draft appears, and would suggest that
anyone who believes that a different model should be chosen
ought to write and submit an Internet-Draft describing the
alternate model to a similar level of detail.

Thanks,
--David

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David L. Black, Senior Technologist
EMC Corporation, 42 South St., Hopkinton, MA  01748
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black_david@emc.com       Mobile: +1 (978) 394-7754
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