FC Enhancements

A comment posted to my previous blog entry reminds me of a requirement I've had for some time from Fibre Channel. In the "Good Old Days" in my first working life as a mainframe systems programmer, I could very easily see a breakdown of response time against each storage device on an LPAR. Now, the passing years may have given me "rose tinted spectacles" (or more accurately now, contact lenses) of that time, but I seem to remember the reason that I could see seek time, disconnect and connect time was due to the design of the (then) MVS I/O subsystem. As each I/O (CCW) was processed, the hardware must have been adding a consistent timestamp to each part of the process; the I/O initiation, the connect, the disconnect and subsequent seek and then the reconnect and data transfer time to complete the I/O (if none of this makes sense, don't worry, it probably means you are under 40 years old and never wore sandals to work).

Nowadays, the I/O infrastructure is a different kettle of fish. Each part of the infrastructure (host, HBA, fabric, array) are provided by different vendors and have no consistent time reference, therefore tracking the time to execute a storage "exchange" is very difficult. There is (as far as I am aware) nowhere within a fibre channel packet to track this response time at each stage of the journey from host to storage.

If we want the next generation of storage networks to scale, then without a doubt we need to be able to track the journey of the I/O at each stage and use this information to provide better I/O profiling.

Now, just how do I become a member of the t11 committee.....