All You Need is TCP: EtherSAN and Storage Networks

It's always fun trying to get feedback on a paper due to be talked up few days later, but that's always seems to be the way it is, at least for the UMN DISC Intelligent Storage Workshop coming up next week.

Anyway, what's the paper about? The idea is think of the big Internet as being your storage channel. Getting the world to work like, say, fibrechannel, but you don't use fibrechannel or some specialized separate network. Nope, we just use a really really low-latency layer1-4 dataflow processing mechanism but like Billy Joel would say "it's still TCP to me".

What we're doing here is not changing TCP, but instead using the end-to-end principle and deploying ethersan at every step between the client and whereever the storage is, ensuring that the rules apply. This means we can keep from having the round trip dependence that fibrechannel has because on a hop-by-hop basis we resolve congestion and retransmission in exactly the same way that TCP does it at the ends.

It was done based on an appeal for new ideas in global storage. Maybe I'm still too ahead of my time here. I *always* seem to get that back from folks, but this time it will be given a hearing. And I guess that's something. :-)

Wish things would pull together faster, but with all the work piling up on me and everyone else I've asked for final feedback from, I always wonder if I can get the time. Ah, no matter - it will happen when it happens.