RE: Enhancements for the iSCSI

[Nelson Nahum <NNahum@store-age.com>]

Ok, there are asynchronous events from the device to the iSCSI HBA, good!.
The question is how these events are passed from the iSCSI HBA to the iSCSI
driver and from the iSCSI driver to the application?. 
Applications like SAN File Systems and Virtualization would benefit from
that.
May be, the solution is to define into the standard how the iSCSI driver
will interface with the applications in order to pass the information that
is not strictly SCSI (IOCTLs etc.).
Today, every FC HBAs has its own APIs, this difficult too much the
applications that need to retrieve
FC information from the HBA. 

Nelson Nahum
StoreAge Networking Technologies

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Wakeley [mailto:matt_wakeley@agilent.com]
Sent: Saturday, September 09, 2000 6:37 AM
To: IPS Reflector
Subject: Re: Enhancements for the iSCSI


Nelson Nahum wrote:

> I think that the iSCSI is a special opportunity to enhance the current
SCSI
> protocol especially it networking capabilities.
> SCSI was designed with the concept of Initiator for the HBA and Target for
> the devices. The Initator sends commands to the Targets that are passive.
> But the networking world supposes every one talking with every one. The
fact
> that iSCSI is implemented over TCP/IP can help to develop these
enhacements.
>
> Modern SAN appliances need to "talk" with the storage devices but also
need
> a way to update information in the HBAs in a asynchronous manner.
>
> My questions are the following:
>
> 1 - Is iSCSI designed in such a way that every Target can also be
Initiator
> and viceversa or it supposes different charasterisitics (memory, CPU power
> etc.) between the Initiator and the Target?

yep.


> 2 - Is possible to add asynchronous events that the Target could send to
the
> Initiators at any time?

That's in the spec too. I guess you haven't read it very closely.


> 3 - Another important enhancement could be the possibility to "broadcast"
> information to many iSCSI devices or HBAs.

Why would you want to do that?


> Nelson Nahum
> CTO
> StoreAge Networking Technologies

Matt Wakeley
Agilent Technologies