[Info-vax] VMS QuickSpecs

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-08-13 20:09:30 +0000, Dirk Munk said:

> FCIP is a protocol to tunnel FC over long distances. IP over FC is in 
> principle the same as IP over ethernet.

Yes, and those are the same links where you'd want to have IPFC.  
Locally, there's rather less of a requirement for FCIP, as 10 GbE and 
40 GbE switches and networks are usually available.

> I tried on Solaris, it was extremely fast.   With IPv6 you can have a 
> packetsize of 16MB, not much protocol overhead.

Apollo had gonzo fast networking, and look where they ended up.

> I meant fibrechannel as such, not the VMS implementation. Fibrechannel 
> was supposed to be the successor of FDDI.

Many products are supposed to be the successor to many products.  Those 
plans don't always work out.

Irrespective of FCIP, FC itself does not appear to have a particularly 
robust future, particularly given the encroachment of cheaper and 
usually "good enough" storage hardware below, and given gonzo-grade 
InfiniBand storage above.  (I'd expect scale-out over scale-up too, but 
you're a far firmer believer in the efficacy and applicability of 
ginormous servers than I am.)

<http://www.mellanox.com/related-docs/whitepapers/WP_Scalable_Storage_InfiniBand_Final.pdf> 


Whether the VMS I/O stacks — whether we're discussing the storage or 
networking stacks, or the file system itself — can even go fast enough 
to reasonably deal with this stuff is an open question, too.

But all this is fodder for VSI.


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