Re: iFCP vs FCIP

[David Robinson <david.robinson@EBay.Sun.COM>]

Joshua Tseng wrote:
> I would say your assessment from a high level is generally correct.
> They are both gateway-to-gateway protocols used to internetwork
> Fibre Channel devices.  But a major difference as discussed in
> previous messages is that FCIP relies on two separate routing
> planes (FSPF for end-to-end and IP routing to tunnel), while iFCP
> maps the Fibre Channel addressing to IP, which allows consolidation
> of all routing and switching functions to the IP routing plane.
> 
> If the authors of FCIP are open to expanding the functionality
> of FCIP to include mapping of Fibre Channel addresses to IP addresses,
> then I would see a basis for consolidation.  FCIP would thus no longer
> be merely a tunneling protocol, but an end-to-end protocol that routes
> Fibre Channel frames over an IP network.

I am no FCP expert so please correct me if I am wrong. In a pure
FCP world, there is end-to-end traffic and there is traffic that is
destined to go between AS's. The primary difference is that there
is an explicit route to the border gateways in the latter case. In both
the proposals, within the FCP realm the addresses are FCP based until
they hit an edge node.  In iFCP the destination is converted to an IP
address that represents the end node address (which may actually be
a gateway back into FCP on the other side), in FCIP the request is
routed to the other AS's FC border gateway and this request is
encapsulated
in a TCP request. Given that we are moving between AS's (I believe that
is an assumption in FCIP) can we not use iFCP and instead of specifying
the IP address of the end node, specify the IP address of the other AS's
border gateway since FCP should already be doing some encapsulation
to route between AS's?

	-David