Re: IPS Draft Charter update

["Mark A. Carlson" <mark.carlson@sun.com>]

This is a very comprehensive overview of what is needed to 
ensure QoS - Quality of Service for IP networks. Which is
fine up to the access point of the storage device. You obviously
wouldn't want the network QoS any less than what the storage can
provide or you are wasting money on your storage capabilities.

Conversely, you may also want to specify the Storage quality of
service as well to better match what you can get out of the
network or to match what the application needs. The referenced 
draft does not cover that area.


I know everyone thinks of disk drives when they think storage
device, and this is equivalent to a "best effort" storage QoS.
If the device dies, your data is lost. You get the performance
that it gives you and it typically can't be tuned other than
laying out the blocks differently.

However, we now have storage devices that can be configured to
provide different levels beyond "best effort" storage with 
integrated RAID, Backup, Snapshot Copy, Remote Mirroring and
Caching. These are equivalent to different forwarding treatments
and so forth in the networking QoS world.

Of course, we can have separate MIBs for the parameters of each
of these different data "treatments", but the administrator 
really doesn't want to care about RAID levels or how to tune
his storage with all of these parameters to get the service
levels that he wants out of his storage. He wants differentiated
storage services that he can match to his application needs, 
just like in the networking world.

In addition, there are now "Storage Service Providers" (SSPs)
that will statically configure (provision) these parameters for 
their customers and offer different service level agreements for
storage services. These businesses would like to offer their
services over IP for all the obvious reasons.

With the integration of both Network QoS and Storage QoS, 
IP based storage services can guarantee service levels all
the way to the storage client with matched performance and
availability from both the network and the storage. This is
why I am interested in having this in our charter.

Perhaps I should do a draft on this to help explain some of
these issues. I am feeling a little alone out on this limb
here. Does anyone else see this as important?

Are there any SSPs out there lurking?

-- mark

Scott Bradner wrote:
> 
> Brian sez:
> > See draft-iab-qos-01.txt for more on what is missing in this area.
> 
> See draft-iab-qos-01.txt for a view on what is missing in this area.
> 
> Scott