IP Storage BOF (ips) Wednesday, August 2 at 1530-1730 ================================ CHAIRS: David Black Steven Bellovin DESCRIPTION: There is significant interest in using IP-based networks to transport block storage traffic. This group will pursue the pragmatic approach of encapsulating existing block storage protocols, such as SCSI and certain Fibre Channel protocols, in an IP-based transport or transports. The group will focus on the transport or transports and related issues (e.g., security, naming, discovery, and configuration), as opposed to modifying existing block storage protocols. Standards for those protocols are controlled by other standards organizations (e.g., T10 [SCSI] and T11 [Fibre Channel]). The WG cannot assume that any changes it desires will be made in these standards, and hence will pursue approaches that do not depend on such changes unless they are unavoidable and in that case will create a document to be forwarded to the standards group responsible for the technology explaining the issue and requesting the desired changes be considered. The WG will endeavor to ensure high quality communications with these standards organizations. The storage protocols to be encapsulated expect a reliable transport, in that failure to deliver data is considered to be a rare event for which time-consuming recovery is acceptable. This has implications for both the choice of transport protocols and design of the encapsulation(s). Encapsulations of the storage protocols may require quality of service assurances (e.g., predictable latency) to operate successfully; the WG will consider what assurances are appropriate and how to provide such assurances in shared traffic environments based on existing IETF QoS mechanisms such as Differentiated Services. Use of an IP-based transport raises issues that do not occur in existing storage transports. The WG will address at least the following issues: - Congestion control suitable for shared traffic network environments, such as the Internet. - Security measures, including authentication and privacy, sufficient to defend against threats up to and including those that can be expected on a public network. - Storage naming and discovery mechanisms for block storage services on IP-based networks, including both discovery of storage for access by the discovering entity, and discovery for management. - Management, including appropriate MIB definition. The WG will address security and congestion control as an integral part of its protocol(s); naming, discovery, and management are important related issues, but may be addressed in companion documents. The WG will consider issues raised by bridges and gateways to existing implementations of block storage protocols in order to support effective interoperability of the protocols developed in the working group with other implementations and/or encapsulations of the same block storage protocol(s). The WG will strive to support the approaches to discovery, multi-pathing, and booting taken by the existing block storage protocols it encapsulates at the levels of those protocols. It may be necessary for block storage traffic to pass through Network Address Translators (NATs) and/or firewalls in some circumstances; the WG will endeavor to design NAT- and firewall-friendly protocols that do not dynamically select target ports or require Application Level Gateways. Effective implementations of some IP transports for block storage traffic are likely to require hardware acceleration; the WG will consider issues concerning the effective implementation of its protocols in hardware. The standard internet checksum is weaker than the checksums used by existing block storage implementations. The WG will consider what levels of data integrity assurance are required for block storage traffic over IP networks and how they should be achieved. The WG will produce a framework document describing the encapsulation or encapsulations it intends to pursue, and requirements, applicability and protocol specification documents for each encapsulation. The framework document will consider whether both end-system and gateway node (including gateways to Fibre Channel) requirements can be accommodated in a single protocol family (e.g., as has been done by the IP Security Protocol). The applicability and requirements documents will consider both disk and tape devices and take note of the variation in scale from single drives to large disk arrays and tape libraries; the protocols need not be applicable to all such devices. The WG will not work on: - Extensions to existing block storage protocols beyond those strictly necessary for the use of IP-based transports. - Modifications to internet transport protocols or approaches requiring transport protocol options that are not widely supported, although the WG may recommend use of such options for block storage traffic. - Support for environments in which significant data loss or data corruption is acceptable. - File system protocols. AGENDA: -- Organizational Matters (20 min) 5 min Agenda Bashing 5 min A few words from the AD 10 min Charter Bashing Draft charter for bashing is appended to this agenda. Please bash the charter on the mailing list in preference to in the meeting, as the charter bashing time can be productively used for other purposes. -- Internet SCSI (iSCSI) (80 min) draft-haagens-ips-iscsireqs-00.txt draft-satran-iscsi-01.txt draft-bakke-iscsimib-00.txt 15 min iSCSI Overview and Rationale 30 min iSCSI Security, may include draft-klein-iscsi-security-01.txt 15 min iSCSI Multiple Channels 15 min iSCSI Error Recovery 5 min iSCSI MIB -- Related Matters (20 min) 15 min FC-over-IP Overview and Rationale draft-ietf-ipfc-fcoverip-02.txt 5 min SEP and Parallel SCSI update draft-wilson-sep-00.txt MAILING LIST: The mailing list is at ips@ece.cmu.edu, to subscribe send "subscribe ips" as the text to majordomo@ece.cmu.edu A web site has been setup at http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ips/