RE: Symmetric vs Asymmetric

[julian_satran@il.ibm.com]

The pro-multiple connection argument was made to mainly to enable several
connections.
I made the argument that it may benefit a single connection too but I
specified that the main
reason I thought it is valuable is for parallelism in the endpoints - e.g.,
using SMPs.
I was not arguing for a more aggressive recovery in case of congestion.
And this is mainly due to poor implementation choices in current stacks -
some of them
bound to be fixed.

Julo

Black_David@emc.com on 07/09/2000 09:58:25

Please respond to Black_David@emc.com

To:   John Hufferd/San Jose/IBM@IBMUS, Black_David@emc.com
cc:   ips@ece.cmu.edu (bcc: Julian Satran/Haifa/IBM)
Subject:  RE: Symmetric vs Asymmetric




> Since I have seen no one else that made arguments for the Symmetric
> implementation, you maybe able to call the agreement on the Asymmetric
> approach a consensus.

While I appreciate the invitation, I'm going to hold off on doing that.
The current state of the discussion doesn't feel like consensus (rough
or otherwise) to me yet, and it seems to me that there have been
people other than John advocating the Symmetric model.

I do want to kill off a red herring that found its way into the discussion.
Squeezing additional bandwidth out of a single network link (HTTP-style)
has not been an important motivation for multiple connections.  The aims
of multiple connections have been to use parallelism in the network for
failover and load balancing.  A few weeks ago, there was rough consensus
that use of multiple connections to squeeze additional bandwidth out of
single network would not be a requirement on iSCSI, and I haven't seen
anything that leads me to believe that this consensus has changed.

Progress is being made -- carry on ...

--David

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