Re: FC/IP vs. iSCSI

[csapuntz@cisco.com]

Hi George,

> FC ports are identified by both a 64 bit port-WWN and a 64 bit node-WWN.
> Together, they form a 128 bit WWN that should scale to the internet.

While a 64-bit flat namespace can certainly uniquely identify all hosts
on the Internet, the name cannot usefully be translated to a route or
address.  

The flat namespace leads to a central authority that translates all
64-bit ids to routes. I do not believe such a central authority
which maintains a flat namespace would scale from a management perspective
(imagine having to register storage LUN with some central authority!)

And it seems to me that building a system that can handle mapping 1 billion
LUN WWNs to IP addresses would be a non-trivial engineering problem.

> (Note, that these addresses do not provide any routing hints.  But that's a
> different kettle of fish.)

Actually, that's a big problem with using WWNs exclusively.

-Costa