IP Storage (ips) ---------------- Charter Last Modified: 2006-05-31 Current Status: Active Working Group Chair(s): David Black Transport Area Director(s): Magnus Westerlund Lars Eggert Transport Area Advisor: Lars Eggert Technical Advisor(s): Keith McCloghrie Murali Rajagopal Franco Travostino John Hufferd Mailing Lists: General Discussion:ips@ietf.org To Subscribe: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ips In Body: subscribe Archive: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ips/index.html Description of Working Group: There is significant interest in using IP-based networks to transport block storage traffic. This group will pursue the pragmatic approach of encapsulating existing protocols, such as SCSI and Fibre Channel, 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 protocols. Standards for the protocols to be encapsulated 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. In that case the WG 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 WG will consider whether a layered architecture providing common transport, security, and/or other functionality for its encapsulations is the best technical approach. The 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 at higher levels is acceptable. This has implications for both the choice of transport protocols and design of the encapsulation(s). The WG's encapsulations may require quality of service assurances (e.g., bounded latency) to operate successfully; the WG will consider what assurances are appropriate and how to provide them in shared traffic environments (e.g., the Internet) based on existing IETF QoS mechanisms such as Differentiated Services. Use of IP-based transports raises issues that do not occur in the existing transports for the protocols to be encapsulated. The WG's protocol encapsulations will incorporate the following: - Congestion control suitable for shared traffic network environments such as the Internet. - Security including authentication, keyed cryptographic data integrity and confidentiality, sufficient to defend against threats up to and including those that can be expected on a public network. Implementation of basic security functionality will be required, although usage may be optional. The WG will also address the following issues related to its protocol encapsulations: - Naming and discovery mechanisms for the encapsulated protocols on IP-based networks, including both discovery of resources (e.g., storage) for access by the discovering entity, and discovery for management. - Management, including appropriate MIB definition(s) for the encapsulations. - By agreement with the IESG, the WG will additionally develop MIB definitions for the SCSI and Fiber Channel standards. The WG specifications will allow the implementation of bridges and gateways that connect to existing implementations of the encapsulated protocols. The WG will preserve the approaches to discovery, multi-pathing, booting, and similar issues taken by the protocols it encapsulates to the extent feasible. It may be necessary for traffic using the WG's encapsulations 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 the encapsulated protocols 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 use by other implementations of the protocols to be encapsulated. The WG will consider what levels of data integrity assurance are required and how they should be achieved. The WG will produce requirements and specification documents for each protocol encapsulation, and may produce applicability statements. The requirements and specification documents will consider both disk and tape devices, taking note of the variation in scale from single drives to large disk arrays and tape libraries, although the requirements and specifications need not encompass all such devices. The WG will not work on: - Extensions to existing protocols such as SCSI and Fibre Channel 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. Operational Structure: Keith McCloghrie (kzm@cisco.com) will serve as the MIB and Network Management advisor for the WG. Due to the scope of the task and the need for parallel progress on multiple work items, the WG effort is organized as follows: A technical coordinator will be identified and selected for each protocol encapsulation adopted as a work item by the group. This person will be responsible for coordinating the technical efforts of the group with respect to that encapsulation, working with and motivating the document editors, and evangelizing the group's work within both the community and relevant external organizations such as T10 and T11. In addition to the normal responsibilities of IETF working group chairs, the IPS chairs are responsible for selection of coordinators, identifying areas of technical commonality and building cross-technology efforts within the group. Coordinators for initially important encapsulations: SCSI over IP (aka iSCSI): John Hufferd (hufferd@us.ibm.com) Fibre Channel (FC-2) over IP: Murali Rajagopal (muralir@cox.net) iFCP: Franco Travostino (travos@nortelnetworks.com) Goals and Milestones: Done Submit the initial protocol encapsulations as working group Internet-Drafts. Done Submit initial version of framework document as an Internet-Draft. Done Discuss drafts and issues at the IETF meeting in San Diego. Done Discuss framework, specification and related drafts (e.g., MIBs, discovery) for the protocol encapsulations at IETF meeting in Minneapolis. Done Submit final version of iSCSI requirements draft to the IESG for consideration as Informational RFC. Done Submit initial Internet-Draft of FCIP/iFCP common encapsulation format Done Begin revision of WG charter in consultation with the Area Directors. Done Meet at IETF meeting in London to discuss specification and related drafts (e.g., MIBs, discovery) for the protocol encapsulations Done WG Last Call on IPS security considerations document. Done WG Last Calls on iSCSI, iSCSI naming/discovery, and iSCSI MIB. Done WG Last Calls on all WG drafts intended to be published as RFCs, except NAA naming draft Done Submit remaining non-MIB protocol drafts intended to be published as RFCs to IESG, except NAA naming draft Done Revise iSCSI boot draft to address security issues and submit to IESG Done Determine whether to advance NAA naming draft for publication as an RFC in consultation with Technical Committee T10 Done Submit draft on iSCSI ordering considerations for SCSI commands to IESG for consideration as Informational. Done Submit NAA naming draft to IESG for publication as an RFC Done Review with ADs what (if any) additional work the WG should undertake Done Submit iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) and DA (Datamover Architecture) drafts to IESG as for Proposed Standard Done Submit remaining MIB draft (iSNS) to IESG for Proposed Standard Dec 2006 Submit X#NodeArchitecture key draft to IESG for RFC publication Jan 2007 Submit iSCSI clarifications and corrections draft to IESG for Proposed Standard Internet-Drafts: Posted Revised I-D Title ------ ------- -------------------------------------------- Oct 2001 Apr 2006 Definitions of Managed Objects for iSNS (Internet Storage Name Service) Sep 2004 Jun 2005 Datamover Architecture for iSCSI (DA) Sep 2004 Oct 2005 iSCSI Extensions for RDMA Specification Jul 2005 Sep 2006 iSCSI Implementer's Guide May 2006 Sep 2006 Declarative Public Extension Key for iSCSI Node Architecture Request For Comments: RFC Stat Published Title ------- -- ----------- ------------------------------------ RFC3347 I Jul 2002 Small Computer Systems Interface protocol over the Internet (iSCSI) Requirements and Design Considerations RFC3643Standard Dec 2003 FC Frame Encapsulation RFC3723Standard Apr 2004 Securing Block Storage Protocols over IP RFC3722Standard Apr 2004 String Profile for iSCSI Names RFC3721 I Apr 2004 iSCSI Naming and Discovery RFC3720Standard Apr 2004 Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) RFC3783 I May 2004 SCSI Command Ordering Considerations with iSCSI RFC3821Standard Jul 2004 Fibre Channel Over TCP/IP (FCIP) RFC3822Standard Jul 2004 Finding FCIP Entities Using SLPv2 RFC3980Standard Feb 2005 T11 Network Address Authority (NAA) naming format for iSCSI Node Names RFC4018Standard May 2005 Finding Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) Targets and Name Servers using Service Location Protocol version 2 (SLPv2) RFC4044Standard May 2005 Fibre Channel Management MIB RFC4171Standard Sep 2005 Internet Storage Name Service (iSNS) RFC4172Standard Sep 2005 iFCP - A Protocol for Internet Fibre Channel Storage Networking RFC4173Standard Sep 2005 Bootstrapping Clients using the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) Protocol RFC4369Standard Jan 2006 Definitions of Managed Objects for Internet Fibre Channel Protocol iFCP RFC4404 PS Feb 2006 Definitions of Managed Objects for Fibre Channel Over TCP/IP (FCIP) RFC4455 PS Apr 2006 Definition of Managed Objects for Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) Entities RFC4545 PS May 2006 Definitions of Managed Objects for IP Storage User Identity Authorization RFC4544 PS May 2006 Definitions of Managed Objects for Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI)