Solicitation of technical input, SM-HBA-2

Robert Snively rsnively at Brocade.COM
Mon Mar 31 14:37:33 PDT 2008


* From the T10 Reflector (t10 at t10.org), posted by:
* "Robert Snively" <rsnively at Brocade.COM>
*
The INCITS Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee is soliciting
technical contributions to the SM-HBA-2 project.  See www.t11.org,
"documents" T11/06-065v3 for the project proposal defining the
scope of the project.  Contributions will be considered at the
next meeting of the SM-HBA-2 adhoc group during the June 2008
T11 committee meetings.  Clause 3.1 says:
"A standard application programming interface (API) defines 
a programming language by which control can be
specified for certain features of a computing system, 
independently of vendor-specific infrastructure behavior.
A host bus adapter (HBA) is a piece of hardware, typically 
on a host system and sometimes embedded on a RAID
controller or other storage device that interfaces between 
a system and a storage access medium. An HBA and
the medium to which it provides access may also support 
applications other than storage, such as delivery of
Internet Protocol (IP) packets.
The Storage Management Host Bus Adapter Application 
Programming Interface (SM-HBA) standard defines an
API for Fibre Channel and SAS HBAs. The Storage Management 
Host Bus Adapter Application Programming
Interface 2nd generation (SM-HBA-2) project proposal 
recommends the development of additions and enhancements
to SM-HBA to support new features of Fibre Channel and SAS 
that have matured during the development of
SM-HBA. The following capabilities should be included in 
the SM-HBA standard:
a) Administration and operation of Fibre Channel 
	additional N_Port_IDs, also known as N_Port ID Virtualization
	(NPIV);
b) Administration and operation of Fibre Channel Virtual Fabric
connectivity;
c) Administration of fabric security features specified 
	for storage networking media supported by the
	standard;
d) Consider opportunities for administration and operation 
	of HBA virtualization models being developed in
	other standards;
e) Consider opportunities to extend consistent administration 
	and operation to other storage networking
	media;
f) Other capabilities that may fit within the general scope of this
project; 
and
g) Binary compatibility with applications written for one or 
	more predecessor specifications of the standard."
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