iSCSI Urgent Pointer

["John Hufferd/San Jose/IBM" <hufferd@us.ibm.com>]

I have been watching this discussion for some time now.  The following is
what I gleam out of the discussions.

First, we must talk about many sessions that come to the same target.  Many
of the messages, on the reflector,  take a SINGLE Session view, and make
arguments that say things like  "it will slow down anyway during a
recovery, so why do it the Urgent Ptr.  Instead, you need to  talk about
the case where the NIC is handling many Sessions.  That is what tends to
show the need for something to limit the impact on the NIC cost while
permitting the Multi session 1-10 Gigabit links to operate at high speed
and at long distances.

Second, in a many session environmentsb, if there is recovery being done
for one session -- in cases where a high speed link is used that is at a
significant distance -- then the impact on that one session will greatly
effect others.  This is because the NIC must queue the partial data, while
it is being recovered, and this can be a lot of data.

Third,assuming that a Urgent Pointer can be found, it means that, only the
data before the Urgent Pointer needs to be queued on the NIC, and
processing can continue with the other work, without reducing the TCP/IP
window.

Fourth, I do not think that the implementations envisioned will be dropping
the Data, instead it will  be Queueing it.  And so it will not be making
the congestion any worse in the network.  The sooner the Urgent Ptr can be
found, the less memory needed to hold the data on the card (while recovery
for missing data is being done).  This means that there will be a lower
probability that a slowdown will be needed for all the Sessions.

If what I have stated in the four point above is true, then the need, and
the solution, seem to  be a compelling match.  Matt, please check the above
and let me know if I got it right.

Now to the point about Must, Should, Will, might.....  I think the word
Should is approprate.  I think we have Three groups of folks to worry
about. Group L , Group E, and Group T.  Group L is the Low end (but
probably high volume) Desktop and Laptop systems that will be using first
10/100 and over time 1000baseT connections.  Many of these systems will use
normal SW TCP/IP stacks and will not be able to take advantage of the
Urgent Pointer.  I do not think the extra overhead will be  missed, at all,
in this environment.  On the other hand, the E group (the Enterprise Class
Servers) will need the fastest cards possible.    Likewise the T Group
(targets),   will need to have as little overhead as possible, yet handle
requests at the very highest speed level.  All  of these Groups (L , E, &
T) need to have their requirements met, in order for iSCSI to be
successful.  And if we think that iSCSI might have a chance to be used
instead of FC, you must be concerned with the E & T Groups being happy.

Therefore, every implementation SHOULD use the Urgent pointer.  Everyone
wins when this works, even the Desktops, because even their 10/100
connections, get trunked together with others into a very high band fiber
that needs to enter the Target and  be serviced with very high speed.
Hence the HW and its optimization and lowest approprate cost is KEY to
everyone.





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John L. Hufferd
Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM)
IBM/SSG San Jose Ca
(408) 256-0403, Tie: 276-0403
Internet address: hufferd@us.ibm.com