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    Re: Some thoughts about draft 05 of iSCSI



    
    
    Responses in text. Julo
    
    "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven" <JeroenR@InterXion.com> on 15/03/2001
    14:20:34
    
    Please respond to "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven" <JeroenR@InterXion.com>
    
    To:   ips@ece.cmu.edu, Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM@IBMIL
    cc:
    Subject:  Some thoughts about draft 05 of iSCSI
    
    
    
    
    Hi all,
    
    first, I am (not yet) subscribed to the list, so if you people
    could keep me in the CC:-loop for this thread I would very much
    appreciate it.
    
    Second, I have some remarks I want to make and some questions to
    ask.  Please bear with me that storage solutions aren't exactly
    my forte aside from a consumer/customer point of view, I am more
    of a networking/programmer type, so I might be asking things which
    might be normal stuff for you.
    I've read some large parts of the archives already, but I might
    have missed my answers.
    
    1) Why was it decided to use a 16 number dotted decimal specifier
       for IPv6 addresses?  As far as I know, and reading RFC 2373
       again, it is not mentioned anywhere, and it is so different from
       what is currently standard practice in notation.  Sure, it's
       simply basic convert-the-number-from-base-x-to-base-y type of
       stuff, but the current practice always settles on colon-delimited
       hexadecimal.
    
    +++ No reason other than convenience. At first I did not know and when I
    learned about I did not know how popular it is and then I forgot completely
    -:) If it is very popular we can change  +++
    
    2) From reading the draft it seems logical to implement iSCSI in
       Operatnig System in a NFS like form, in which certain disk access
       gets exported and the kernel/low-level stuff/daemon(s) handle the
       actual requests/responses.
       What scares me though is that with NFS one knows he is accessing
       filesystems over a network, with iSCSI we want to make it as
       transparent as possible [at least that's how it struck me], but
       how is the blocking issue looked upon then?  It seems hard to
       guarantee the same reponse over a network as with directly coupled
       cables.  I am very much interested in this, since if we want to
       deploy this as a product our customers will have at least the
       following demands/questions:
    
         - data integrity
         - speed/latency
    
    +++ both should be better than NFS -:). For data integrity we have
    end-to-end digests - (does NFS?) for latency we have no wonders but we did
    our best to allow hiding it and not let it affect throughput +++
    
    3) Julian, on page 80 of draft 05, section 6.2, last sentence:
       "it receives the a Data PDU with" should probably be:
       "it receives a DATA PDU with".
    +++ will fix case +++
    4) Am I correct in assuming, based 'pon my readnig of the draft, that
       bursting is limited to what FirstBurstSize is set to?  So there is
       little/no chance of having the iSCSI protocol saturate the available
       networkbandwidth all of a sudden by bursting to the max.
    +++ bursting limit (unsolicited data) is meant mainly to help targets but
    network could also benefit +++
    5) The draft specifies that both data PDU and commands are being sent
       over the same TCP connection.  This got me curious about the fact
       if iSCSI commands would get delayed if sufficiently large amounts of
       data are being sent over the TCP connection.
       For example, with some protocols they have a seperate control and
    data
       connection.  IIRC, NNTP-streaming has it, ISDN is another prime
       example of this.
    +++ don't get back into this - many of us have open wounds here -:)
    Thanks in advance for any trouble and time taken to answer
    my questions,
    
    --
    Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <jeroenr@interxion.com>
    Systems Software Engineer  /  Connectivity Services Development
    InterXion, where the Internet lives <http://www.interxion.com/>
    
    
    
    


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Last updated: Tue Sep 04 01:05:20 2001
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