RE: Ecosystems cost of additional specs (RE: Please re ad - proposed WG termination)

At 12:39 PM 9/3/2005, Carl Hensler wrote:

> > Date: Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:45:30 -0700
> > From: Michael Krause <[email protected]>
> > Subject: RE: Ecosystems cost of additional specs (RE: [Ipoverib] 
> Please
>re ad - proposed WG termination)
> > To: Dror Goldenberg <[email protected]>, "'Harald Tveit Alvestrand'"
><[email protected]>
> > Cc: [email protected]
>
> > Somewhat an aside, but it is ironic that standard APIs are often ignored /
> > deemed "crap" by some even if many systems can benefit from them yet this
> > spec which is likely to be implemented by a single OS and used only in
> > perhaps a subset of deployments is deemed worthy. Apologies for the 
> tangent.
>
>Mike,
>
>IPoIB-CM is an optional protocol extension accessed through the
>standard networking API, Sockets.
>
>If standardized, it will be implemented for all three major OSes,
>Linux and Windows in OpenIB, and Solaris at Sun.

Didn't know Solaris was a major OS from a volume perspective (might be said 
for any Unix these days as there really are only two OS of any real volume 
any longer).  :)  I will state that at this point in time, I am not 
recommending to my company to do any work on IPoIB-CM and I plan to push on 
spending resources on where there is significant value and ROI 
opportunities on the RDMA side of things not on making IP-based stacks work 
better (we are already getting more than good enough performance with the 
existing specs implemented).

In any case, Windows is really a third-party provider doing the work not 
MS.  Does not really matter I suppose in the end.

>I think the WG should complete work on IPoIB-CM expeditiously,
>and determine whether there is community support for completing
>the MIBs.

I don't see the work as compelling but people are free to ignore me as I'm 
just one voice within the IETF here.  I personally believe the emphasis 
should be on getting a solid RDMA infrastructure in place and using that 
for ULP communication than on making what is already a reasonable IP over 
IB network stack more optimal.  If you go back through the history of 
interconnects, when one cannot demonstrate significant benefit difference 
to customers or take too long to get the value-add right, then customers 
are fine with going with the evolutionary technology.  10 GbE RNIC prices 
are dropping as are switch port costs.  While they may not be on par with 
IB today, by the time it really matters to customers, the total solution 
costs which go well beyond the hardware may result in 10 GbE being just 
fine.  10 GbE will have LSO, LRO, whatever as well as RDMA and a much lower 
cost to integrate management and associated ecosystems into the data 
center.  Spending resources on making IP communication better on IB is 
simply a poor use of resources with minimum end visible customer benefit 
especially if some of the OS such as Windows already have the hooks in 
place to support RDMA ULP via Winsocks Direct.

Mike

_______________________________________________
IPoverIB mailing list
[email protected]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipoverib