RE: iFCP as an IP Storage Work Item

[Charles Monia <cmonia@NishanSystems.com>]

Hi Venkat:

I don't find much of technical substance to reply to here.  Obviously,
you're entitled to your views and a position based on your internal business
and product development considerations is not something that can be
productively debated in this or any other forum.

I've interspersed some additional comments below.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Venkat Rangan [mailto:venkat@rhapsodynetworks.com]
> Sent: Saturday, January 06, 2001 11:35 AM
> To: Charles Monia; Ips@Ece. Cmu. Edu
> Subject: RE: iFCP as an IP Storage Work Item
> 
> 
> Hi Charles,
> 
> Thanks for offering your perspective. I respect your opinions 
> and I'm sure
> my responses would be exactly the same as yours if I were in 
> your position.
> 
> > That aside, the general thrust of this note seems
> > to reflect business rather than technical concerns.
> 
> I am not sure if we can separate the overall market viability from
> technical. From our perspective, we do not want the IPS 
> Working Group to
> endorse multiple technologies to address same or relatively 
> close solutions.
> While it is easy to say that as a vendor it should be 
> possible for them to
> support iSCSI, iFCP and FCIP protocols, the cost of 
> developing a solution
> that addresses all three (which includes not just product 
> development but
> testing, certifying and validating interoperable solutions) 
> is something
> that we as a vendor would not like to be drawn into. 
> If you 
> think this is a
> business reason, and should be ignored, we disagree with that opinion.
> 

How can product development concerns be anything else? That being the case,
I don't see how such issues can be productively addressed by the WG.

That said, I'm having a hard time connecting the dots of your market
viability argument.  On the one hand you imply that iFCP is not viable from
a marketing perspective, while asserting at the same time that you'll be
drawn into building iFCP products.  Why else would you have that problem
except in response to the demands of the marketplace? If you truly believe
it's not viable, then you can safely ignore the technology and go about your
business.

> > Such confusion, if it exists, is best sorted out in the 
> marketplace.  In
> my
> > opinion, it's not the business of standards organizations 
> to anoint any
> one
> > technology by picking winners and losers (as some would 
> apparently wish).
> 
> The standards organizations often pick something and others 
> are forced to
> support that. 
> We could let the marketplace decide, but that can be an
> expensive option for the market and can be detrimental to all 
> vendors. 

I don't understand where force enters the picture.

Your position seems based on the arbitrary assumption that some solutions
(namely yours) have a greater inherent claim to legitimacy than others.
That's certainly a matter of opinion. I've always believed that market
competition is a good thing. Obviously, you don't seem to share that view.

>...............................................As an
> example, while we are arguing about iFCP, FCIP and iSCSI, 
> InfiniBand may
> enter the market and with a coherent proposal, may make this 
> irrelevant.
> 

I don't think the time taken to settle this matter is going to make much
difference in the scheme of things. Nonethless, it strikes me that iSCSI and
FCIP are making good progress while this debate goes on.

> I assume that you agree that the combination of iSCSI, FCIP 
> and iFCP has
> redundant technology elements. 

Commonality -- yes to the extent that they all use the same set of wires and
deliver storage solutions.  Redundancy? Absolutely not.

>...............................We believe the IP Storage 
> Working Group needs
> to address the redundant parts which may mean picking 
> something. 
> When it
> does, we expect vendors to adopt and support what is picked.

Who decides what's 'redundant' and on what basis?  

> Do you not see
> a role in standards bodies to pick some technology? 

Absolutely not --  even if it were my favorite solution (as opposed to
yours).

>..............................If you do 
> not, why is
> iFCP being brought to the IP Storage Working Group as a work item?
> 

We brought iFCP to the WG not because we want to legislate what the market
should have but because we believe it can coexist with and offer benefits
that are unique and distinct from the other technologies on the table.

Will we also support iSCSI? You bet. We're in the business of supplying
end-to-end IP-based storage solutions. Unlike some, we see these
technologies as opportunities to be exploited, not threats to be feared or
suppressed.


> > Such assertions about processing overhead are totally without
> > foundation or substance.
> 
> I do not think so. To perform cut-through routing, we only 
> need to examine
> the first 8 bits of a frame (the domain id part of D_ID) to 
> send it to an
> E_Port. If it is within the switch, you can do so by 
> examining the first 24
> bits of the frame (D_ID). Typically, most switches can do 
> this by adding
> less than two to five microseconds to the latency. To perform 
> a lookup to
> establish the From and To of both S_ID and D_ID and 
> substitute the addresses
> and recompute a new CRC or digest would, in my opinion, take 
> more cycles.
> Evidently, you seem to disagree, which is fine.
> 

While a discussion around clock cycles would be fun sometime, I'll simply
point out that we also have a similar bag of tricks and we expect our
performance to be on a par.  Anyhow, in the context of a total system, I
believe this is something that gets lost in the noise.

<remainder deleted>

Charles
Charles Monia
Senior Technology Consultant
Nishan Systems
email: cmonia@nishansystems.com
voice: (408) 519-3986
fax:   (408) 435-8385