Re: Enhancements for the iSCSI

["Matt Wakeley" <matt_wakeley@agilent.com>]

It's hard enough getting what runs on the wire standardized.
I don't think you'd get anyone to agree on the HBA API.

Luckily for us, we are only defining the wire protocol.

-Matt

Nelson Nahum wrote:

> 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