Encapsulating IP with the Small Computer System Interface
on May 29, 2008 at 4:09 amStatus of this Memo
This memo defines an Experimental Protocol for the Internet community.
This memo does not specify an Internet standard of any kind. Discussion
and suggestions for improvement are requested. Distribution of this memo
is unlimited.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Brief background to the Small Computer System Interface . 2
3. Link Encapsulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. An Address Resolution Protocol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. Scalability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. Possible applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
7. Security considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
8. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
9. Author’s Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1. Introduction
===============
As the capacity of local area networks increases to meet the demands of
high volume application data, there is a class of network intensive
problems which may be applied to small clusters of workstations with
high bandwidth interconnection.
A general observation of networks is that the bit rate of the data path
typically decreases as the distance between hosts increases. It is
common to see regional networks connected at a rate of 64Kbps and office
networks connected at 100Mbps, but the inverse is far less common.
The same is true of peripheral and memory interconnection. Memory close
to a CPU’s core may run at speeds equivalent to a gigabit network. More
importantly, devices such as disks may connect a number of metres away
from its host at speeds well in excess of current local area network
capacity.
Elliston Experimental [Page 1]
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RFC 2143 Encapsulating IP with the SCSI May 1997
This document outlines a protocol for connecting hosts running the
TCP/IP protocol suite over a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) bus.
Despite the limitation in the furthest distance between hosts, SCSI
permits close clusters of workstations to communicate between each other
at speeds approaching 360 megabits per second.
The proposed introduction of newer SCSI implementations such as serial
SCSI will bring much faster communication at greater distances.
2. Background to the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI)
===========================================================
SCSI defines a physical and data link protocol for connecting
peripherals to hosts. Devices connect autonomously to a bus and send
synchronous or asynchronous messages to other devices.
Devices are identified by a numeric identifier (ID). For the original
SCSI protocol, devices are given a user-selectable SCSI ID between 0 and
7. Wide SCSI specifies a range of SCSI IDs between 0 and 15. The most
typical SCSI configuration comprises of a host adapter and one or more
SCSI- capable peripherals responding to asynchronous messages from the
host adapter.
The most critical aspect of the protocol with respect to its use as a
data link for the Internet protocols is that a SCSI device must act as
an “initiator” (generator of SCSI commands/requests) or a “target” (a
device which responds to SCSI commands from the initiator). This model
is correct for a master/slave relationship between host adapter and
devices. The only time an initiator receives a message addressed to it
is in response to a command issued by it in the past and a target device
always generates a response to every command it receives.
Clearly this is unsuitable for the peer-to-peer model required for
multiple host adapters to asynchronously send SCSI commands to one
another without surplus bus traffic. Furthermore, some host adapters may
refuse to accept a message from another adapter as it expects to only
initiate SCSI commands. This restriction to the protocol requires that
SCSI adapters used for IP encapsulation support what is known as “target
mode”, with software device driver support to pass these messages up to
higher layer modules for processing.
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RFC 2143 Encapsulating IP with the SCSI May 1997
3. Link Encapsulation
=====================
The ANSI SCSI standard defines classes of peripherals which may be
interconnected with the SCSI protocol. One of these is the class of
“communication devices” [1].
The standard defines three message types capable of carrying a
general-purpose payload across communication devices. Each of these are
known as the “SEND MESSAGE” message type, but the size and and structure
of the message header differs amongst them. The three forms of message
header are six (6), ten (10) and twelve (12) bytes long.
It was decided that the ten byte header offers the greatest flexibility
for encapsulating version 4 IP datagrams for the following reasons:
a. The transfer length field is 16 bits in size which is perfectly
matched to the datagram length field in IP version 4.
Implementations of IP will run efficiently as datagrams will never
be fragmented over SCSI networks.
b. The SCSI “stream select” field, which was designed to permit
a device to specify the stream of data to which a block belongs, may
be used to encode the payload type (in a similar manner to the
Ethernet frame type field). For consistency, the lowest four bits of
the “stream select” field should match the set of values assigned by
the IEEE for Ethernet protocol types.
Encapsulating an IP datagram within a SCSI message is
straightforward:
———————————————————————-
| SCSI header | IP datagram |
———————————————————————-
The fields of the SCSI header should be completed as follows:
Byte 0: 0x2A (SEND_MESSAGE(10) opcode)
Byte 1: Logical unit number encoded into top 3 bits | 0×00
Byte 2: 0×00
Byte 3: 0×00
Byte 4: 0×00
Byte 5: Protocol type encoded into lowest 4 bits | 0×00
Byte 6: 0×00
Bytes 7/8: IP datagram length, big endian representation
Byte 9: 0×00
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RFC 2143 Encapsulating IP with the SCSI May 1997
4. An Address Resolution Protocol
=================================
When IP decides that the next hop for a datagram will be onto a SCSI
network supported by a SCSI IP network interface implementation, it
is necessary to acquire a data link address to deliver the datagram.
Network interfaces such as Ethernet have well-known methods for
acquiring the media address for an Internet protocol address, the most
common being the Address Resolution Protocol (ARP). In existing
implementations, the forwarding host “yells” using a broadcast media
address and expects the named host to respond.
The SCSI protocol does not provide a broadcast data link address. An
acceptable solution to the address resolution problem for a SCSI network
is to simulate a broadcast by performing a series of round- robin
transmissions to each target. Depending on the SCSI protocol being used,
this would require upward of seven independent bus accesses. This is not
grossly inefficient, however, if combined with an effective ARP caching
policy. A further possible optimisation is negative ARP caching, whereby
incomplete ARP bindings are not queried for some period in the future.
5. Scalability
==============
While the utility of a network architecture based around a bus network
which can span less than ten metres and support only eight hosts may be
questionable, the flexibility of IP and in particular, IP routing,
improves the scalability of this architecture.
Consider a network of eight hosts connected to a SCSI bus in which each
host acts as a multi-homed host with a second host adapter connecting
another seven hosts to it. When configured with IP packet routing
capability, each of the 64 total hosts may communicate with one another
at high speed in a packet switched manner.
Depending on the I/O bus capabilities of certain workstations, it may
also be possible to configure a multi-homed host with a greater number
of SCSI host adapters, permitting centralised star configurations to be
constructed.
It should be apparent that for little expense, massively parallel
virtual machines can be built based upon the IP protocol running over
the high-bandwidth SCSI protocol.
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RFC 2143 Encapsulating IP with the SCSI May 1997
6. Possible Applications
========================
Research has been made into the capability of “networks of
workstations”, and their performance compared to supercomputers. An
observation that has been made thus far is that bottlenecks exist in the
channels by which executable code is transported between hosts for
execution. A very high-speed network architecture based around the
Internet protocol would permit a seamless transition of existing
application software to a high-bandwidth environment.
Other applications that have been considered are server clusters for
fault-tolerant NFS, World-Wide Web and database services.
7. Security Considerations
==========================
Transmitting IP datagrams across a SCSI bus raises similar security
issues to other local area networking architectures. The scale of
security problems relating to protocols above the data link layer should
be obvious to a reader current in Internet security.
8. References
=============
1) ANSI X3T9 Technical Committee, “Small Computer System Interface -
2″, X3T9.2, Project 375D, Revision 10L, September 1993.
9. Author’s Address
===================
Ben Elliston
Compucat Research Pty Limited
Box 7305 Canberra Mail Centre
Canberra ACT 2610
Australia
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