[ewg] Re: [ofa-general] [PATCH 0/9] RDMAoE - RDMA over Ethernet

[Paul Grun]

The bottom line is that we're talking about carrying an RDMA protocol over
an Ethernet wire.  It just so happens that this particular proposal uses
IB's RDMA protocol.  It does so for two reasons; 1. It already exists and
has been validated and 2. it is relatively straightforward to implement.

Your example of building an IB router for carrying IB over the WAN is an
interesting one.  It so happens that I've been working on just such a
project; that project has moved away from calling the device an IB router in
favor of calling it a WAN gateway.  In any case, the analogy is imperfect
since the function of the WAN gateway is to connect either two IB subnets,
or in the case of the project I've been working on, it is to connect two
segments of an IB subnet.  In either case, it's clearly about IB.

I'll concede the point about FCoE.  Nevertheless, I see lots of merit, at
least in this case, in using an expression to describe the technology which
is crisp and unambiguous.

-Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Roland Dreier [mailto:rdreier at cisco.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 2:14 PM
To: Paul Grun
Cc: 'Jason Gunthorpe'; 'Sean Hefty'; 'ewg'; 'general-list'
Subject: Re: [ewg] Re: [ofa-general] [PATCH 0/9] RDMAoE - RDMA over Ethernet


 > If I might chime in here...I've been working to actively squash the
 > expression 'IBoE' or any variation that includes IB in the name.  The
reason
 > is because the InfiniBand Architecture is defined as a cohesive solution
 > that includes five layers of the OSI stack.  Hence using the expression
IBoE
 > creates unnecessary confusion by implying that RDMAoE includes elements
of
 > IB from the five OSI layers, which is not an accurate description of the
 > proposal.

Seems pretty silly to me -- if I build an IB router that carries IB over
the WAN on MPLS, is it not InfiniBand because it uses the wrong layer 1?
Similarly the worlds seems to cope with talking about FCoE rather than
SCSIoE even though FCoE does not share all the OSI layers of fibre channel.