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Forums & Initiatives » IP Storage Forum » Hot Topics

IP Storage Hot Topics

Here's what's hot in the IP Storage world...
  • ISCSI Managment API
  • What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)?
  • What is the buzz about Green Storage? How does it relate to IP Storage?
  • iSCSI's role in the next-generation datacenter - What does the datacenter of the future look like?
  • iSCSI over Infiniband: does this make sense?
  • Storage Grids


iSCSI Management API version 1.1.6 is approved as an ANSI standard
ANSI INCITS 411-2007)

The IMA is a specification for a C language based API for managing iSCSI capable HBAs and NICs, along with the device drivers that control IMA provides APIs to perform a variety of different functions including:

  • Configuring HBAs and device drivers
  • Downloading firmware to HBAs
  • Discovering iSCSI storage devices that can be reached via a network connection on an iSCSI capable HBA or NIC
  • Controlling the visibility of iSCSI peripherals to the host operating system
  • Retrieving statistics describing how much data has been transferred to and from iSCSI peripherals

As an "open systems" specification, the IMA is intended for use across a wide variety of operating systems including Windows®, Linux®, Solaris™, HP-UX, and AIX®. Storage management applications will use the IMA to help them manage iSCSI SANs.




What is Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) ?

Fibre Channel over Ethernet is a proposal for a new protocol specification which has been submitted to the INCITS T11 Committee. FCoE is a means of transmitting Fibre Channel commands natively over Ethernet by using an optional transport mechanism instead of TCP/IP, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing Fibre Channel endpoint infrastructure. FCoE is on an aggressive schedule in T11, and there is a good chance that it will emerge as a new ANSI standard in the 2009 timeframe.




What is the buzz about Green Storage? How does it relate to IP Storage?

If you have been reading news related to storage, you probably come across the word "green" quite a few times in the last year or so. So what is the entire buzz about Green Storage and how it's going to affect IP Storage?

A new taskforce and a Technical Working Group (TWG) has been set up within SNIA to provide education on Green Storage, and to create power efficiency metrics for storage systems. The SNIA Green Storage initiative (GSI) will collaborate closely with the Green Grid (a vendor consortium focused on power efficiency at the data center level) to ensure consistency of metrics and education. Although the GSI is focused primarily on power efficiency, other 'green' topics have not been ruled out.

How does IP Storage plays a role in this effort?

Over the last few years iSCSI matured rapidly with growing acceptance and credibility among SMBs and Enterprise Customers for cost effective storage consolidation solutions for mission critical business applications, particularily for Windows environments. 10 Gigabit Ethernet deployments are emerging with improvements like scalable networking. Regarding TCP offloading, we are opening the flood gates for large scale storage consolidation coupled with ease of use

Consequently, iSCSI is playing, and will continue to play, a major role in innovations that will make data centers consume less power both directly and indirectly. The combination of easy to use, high performance arrays based on the latest drive and power technologies, the widespread implementation of array-based virtualization, thin provisioning and Data De-Duplication all indicate that when power efficiency metrics are available for storage systems, IP Storage will be seen as a strong contributor to 'green' data centers.




iSCSI's role in the next-generation datacenter

The 'data center of the future' is increasingly an industry topic of conversation. Over the coming months this will continue to increase as the complex challenges around power and space intersect with increasing focus on a 'unified' data center fabric - with a single network architecture for storage networks, servers and services. It seems likely, at this point, that 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GBE) will play an important role here.

10 Gigabit Ethernet is available now for switch, server and storage interconnects. Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) work is well advanced in the IETF - enabling low-latency sesrver clustering. Latency and performance enhancements for Ethernet are well under way in the IEEE 802.3 Working Group. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is very active in ANSI T11 - ensuring a future seamless transition to a 10 Gigabit Ethernet fabric infrastructure for today's Fibre Channel HBA's and storage arrays. And, iSCSI is will established as a mainstream navite storeag protocol for IP-based SAN solutions.

Customer can confidently buy iSCSI-based SAN solutions today, knowing that they have a smooth path to 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the various transport-level latency and performance enhancements, and the unified fabric services we are likely to see in the next generation data centers.




iSCSI over Infiniband: does this make sense?

With iSER protocols ratification, and more products coming online, users are looking for validation that iSCSI and Infiniband are complimentary technologies ready for primetime. In a nutshell: infiniband offers an efficient point to point architecture between processors and I/O traffic that offers increased bandwidth and "switching" functionality. In theory the simplicity of iSCSI deployment combined with the low-latency of Infiniband can offer a excellent high-performance storage infrastructure for applications beyond Infiniband's stronghold in high performance computing. The iSER protocol allows iSCSI traffic to bypass TCP processing altogether by using RDMA increasing performance and decreasing overhead. With today's workloads and processing power the overhead of the TCP protocol isn't problematic since typical systems are still significantly underutilized, but this may change in the future as system utilization increases, standard networking speeds increase beyond 10Gb/s and applications begin to take advantage of the power of the newer interconnects.




Storage Grids

Grids have been widely discussed in technical circles over the past few years as the next killer app to take advantage of the relative power of today's 'low-cost' hardware. Storage grids are next on the agenda and are being utilized in some shape or form by clustered NAS operating systems and Google's file system. Each of these file-centric technique offers a way to consolidate disparate storage resources into one giant, redundant pool. The transition to grids will occur once more storage services happen at a virtual layer, where physical storage resources are pooled together and services happen independent of the disk controllers. As end-user begin to demand and deploy more open-standards, and vendors increase interoperability, block level storage grids utilizing IP protocols should become more prevalent via advanced storage virtualization techniques and increased consolidation and centralization of server, network and storage resources.




Grid, Thin Provisioning and Cloning
Usage of a Grid Approach in combination with thin provisioning and cloning reduces the amount of individual copies of operating systems disks and provides a minimum number of "Golden Images" which can be used to serve a large number of disk-less blade servers -- this greatly diminishes the number of physical drives needed which also has an impact on an achieving a "Greener" environment.


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  • SNIA’s iSCSI Management API (IMA) v1.1.6 is a new ISO Standard ISO/IEC 11989-2008
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