T11 Document Number: T11/07-315v0
INCITS Document Number:IN070635

INCITS Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee (FC-TC) Annual Report

June 17, 2006 to June 8, 2007

INCITS Sub-group:

INCITS Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee (FC-TC)

Links and contents:

•  Link to Website of FC-TC (includes all documents, minutes, and member information)
•  Executive Summary
• Link to FC-TC area on the INCITS Projects Database
•  Significant Accomplishments
• Significant Challenges
• Expected Challenges
• Previous year's meetings
• Next year's planned meetings
• Liaison Activities
• FC-TC Membership and Officers
• Future Trends
• Other Administrative Information

Informal Description of Work:

The Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee (FC-TC) is responsible for storage interconnect and networking families of standards, including Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel protocol mappings to higher level architectures, Fibre Channel mappings to alternate physical transports, SBCON, HIPPI, and a number of related management and API standards.  FC-TC is co-TAG to ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 25/WG 4 along with INCITS TC T10 and the IEEE MSC.  Fibre Channel is the technology used to implement Storage Area Networks, allowing the many benefits from storage consolidation and remote storage access.  Most standards development for FC-TC projects is actually performed within the TC.

1.  Executive Summary:

The reporting period has been a time of expanding the scope of the Fibre Channel standards, including major performance improvements and cost reductions in the physical layer definitions, improved scaling to large systems, new management features, mapping Fibre Channel to alternate transports, and active liaison with organizations defining associated management tools.  Projects that have reached publication include  FC-AE-ASM, FC-AL2/AM2, FC-BB-3, FC-FS-2, FC-PI-2, FC-SP, FC-SW-4,   and SM-HBA.  New projects include FAIS-2, FC-BB-5, FC-DA-2, FC-FS-2 Amendment 1, FC-FS-3, FC-SB-3/A1, and SM-HBA-2all of which provide incremental improvements in cost, performance, or function of Fibre Channel.  Active liaison projects that are complete include a project related to Fibre Channel Management Information Blocks (MIBs) in cooperation with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).  In addition, T11 provides liaison and ISO support for a number of standards organizations.  From those, the SNIA MMA Rapid I/O have been published.

Most of the FC-TC developed standards are later forwarded through ISO/IEC JTC1 SC25 WG4 for international standardization.

Extended capability of the core standards:

The core standards of Fibre Channel continue to be refined, clarifying implementation requirements and adding new capabilities.  Special attention has been focused on methods of expanding the addressing and routing capabilities of Fibre Channel switches.  FC-FS-3, FC-IFR, FC-LS, FC-SW-5, and FC-GS-6 are standards treated in these discussions.

Physical layer:

The physical layer technologies continue to improve in performance and cost-effectiveness, making the FC-PI-3 and FC-PI-4 standards the focus of intense concentration by organizations bringing these new technologies to the industry.  Most recently, there has been increased interest in even lower cost links based on CAT-5 and CAT-6 cabling, carried forward in the FC-BaseT standard.  The tools for qualifying and testing these technologies are provided in the FCSM-2 technical reports.

Remote access and alternate link technology:

Fibre Channel is important as a high-performance secure mechanism for remote access to storage.  To complement the FC-BB-4 capabilities for transmitting Fibre Channel over SONET, TCP/IP, Generic Framing Protocol links, and Pseudo-Wire environments, FC-BB-5 is developing the tools to transmit Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet.

Security:

The use of Fibre Channel links in more sensitive environments and outside secure computer rooms has increased the requirements for security.  The FC-SP-2 standard has been started to extend the security protection for Fibre Channel environments already defined in FC-SP.

Management and programming interfaces:

Fibre Channel environments are growing in sophistication and complexity.  To provide management and application support for such environments management and application programming interfaces, including SM-HBA, FAIS, and SNPing are being developed.  In addition, contributions defining MIBS for Fibre Channel management, including SM-SPM and many previous MIBS, were  prepared for standardization by the IETF.   Liaison activities are similarly carrying forward various SNIA projects for management in the international standards arena.

As a result of these activities, the total program of work of FC-TC during the period of this annual report is summarized as follows:

FC-TC work continues to be recognized and supported by the industry. For this reason, 7 new standards have been brought into the committee during this period.  FC-TC had 45 voting and 13 advisory member organizations in June of 2007, compared with 52 voting and 11 advisory member organizations in June of 2006. The decline is largely associated with mergers and acquisitions. An additional 7 organizations participate in the FC-TC Task Groups, as compared with 6 in June of 2006, with the additional members principally in the T11.2 Task Group. 

The following is the outline of the three task groups of  FC-TC and the project allocation to the TC and TGs:

FC-TC: Technical Committee for Device Level Interfaces

FC-TC is preparing the Amendment to 10GFC and the FC-BaseT standard .

FC-TC is one of the Technical Advisory Groups (TAGs) for ISO/IEC/JTC 1/SC 25/WG 4.  Most of its TAG activity addresses standards and technical reports that FC-TC has first developed as ANSI/INCITS standards, including Fibre Channel, HIPPI, and IPI standards.  It has provided and will continue to provide guidance on other WG 4 proposed standards as required, including RapidIO Interconnect Specification (IS 18372) and Responsive Link (to be IS 24740). In addition, FC-TC provides support for the international standardization of Storage Management Interface (SMI-S) (to be IS 24775) a standard fast-tracked by SNIA through INCITS.

TG T11.2: Physical Variants

The projects currently allocated to this task group include: 10GFC/A1, FC-BaseT,  FC‑PI‑3, FC‑PI‑4, and FCSM‑2.  

TG T11.3 Interconnect topologies and protocol mapping

The projects currently allocated to this task group include: FC‑AE‑1553, FC-BB-4, FC-FS-2 Amendment 1, FC-FS-3, FC-GS-5, FC-GS-6, FC-IFR, FC-LS, FC-SATA, FC-SCM, FC-SP, FC-SP-2, and FC‑SW‑5.

TG T11.5 Storage Management Interfaces:

The projects currently allocated to this group are FAIS, FAIS-2, SM-HBA-2, and SNPing.  All contribution products are now in the development and approval process at the IETF.

2. Significant Accomplishments

The committee has forwarded 7 new project proposals and published 8 standards or technical reports during this period as described in the executive summary.  

Over 1000 documents and presentations have been prepared supporting the technical and administrative activities of the committee in the 12 month period this report covers, representing over 180 Megabytes of information.

3. Significant Challenges

The most significant challenge this period, as during the last, has been the broadening applicability of Fibre Channel and storage networking technologies.  This has evidenced itself in requirements for new Fibre Channel functionality, including low cost twisted-pair links, higher performance optical links, security protocols, application programming interfaces, and inter-fabric routing capabilities. In addition, a relatively significant extension of Fibre Channel Technology called "Fibre Channel over Ethernet" (FCoE) has recently come forward to address a part of the server marketplace.  The potential commercial impacts of FCoE are significant, requiring T11 to be very sensitive to proper INCITS procedures to moderate a potentially emotional standards development process.

The storage related area of the computer industry is continuing to consolidate.  That both reduces the membership of the committees and changes the focus of the development projects.  Projects tend to be more narrowly focused to enable the implementation of certain limited sets of feature extensions.  The high quality of participants and the narrower technical focus of the projects has enabled the continue success of the committee in spite of the lower participation.

In addition, we have encountered some administrative requirements which have proved very interesting.

Registries

Last year, the FC-TC required the creation of an INCITS registry for an Object Identifier (OID) for the FC-SP and FC-SP-2 standards.   INCITS has created such a registry.

Requirements for other registries are also being identified, including an INCITS Ethernet auto-negotiation registry. The FC-BaseT standard defining the use of Ethernet-like twisted-pair cables requires a distinctive auto-negotiation value.  IEEE 802.3 has agreed to grant that value, but rather than grant it to the FC-BaseT standard, it has granted it to INCITS.  That means that any future INCITS project using Ethernet cables may obtain modifiers for that value under an INCITS registry.  The format of those modifiers is being worked out by the developers of the FC-BaseT standard and a proposed registration procedure will be provided to INCITS when this work is complete.    This registration procedure may also increase demands on INCITS staff. 

ISO IP disclosures

The intellectual property disclosure statement required by INCITS and ANSI  is inconsistent with the ISO/IEC intellectual property disclosure statement.  As a result, a separate disclosure must be created by each company claiming intellectual property in standards that are destined for the international standards arena.  This is creating significant delays in the internationalization of many of our standards.  We have noted this problem to INCITS and ANSI, but have not yet been able to gain the attention necessary to create a satisfactory solution.

 4.  Expected Challenges

The commercial success of Fibre Channel drives a bottom-line focus on standards participation.  This has several side effects.

In some cases, there is increased contention during the standards process driven by economic interests in particular technical solutions.  This has required fairly strict enforcement of INCITS standards development guidelines to moderate possible sources of contention and to facilitate the necessary discussion and compromise during standards development.

In most cases, there is increased focus on those improvements to a standard that will have the most favorable economic impact on the technologies.  That provides for a slightly narrower standards focus than we have had in the past, but seems to be guaranteeing higher quality in the developed standard.  Especially in the physical layer work, much of the work coming in to the committee is very original and at the leading edge of the technology.  This more focused approach is also associated with the wide acceptance of the Fibre Channel technology.  The industry has a very good knowledge of the technology and its capabilities.  As a result, the representatives focus on those areas of the technology that provide the most economic and functional benefit to the industry as a whole.

In the last annual report, I indicated that the emergence of additional storage networking technologies and standardization venues might become a challenge.  In fact, FC-TC has found that most such venues are creating additional value to the storage networking industry and additional interest in and value of FC-TC as a standards venue.  In many cases, alternative standards venues, including INCITS T10, INCITS T13, IEEE 802, SNIA, and IETF, are complementing storage area networking activities in FC-TC, rather than competing with them. Maintaining an open and flexible INCITS participation policy and business model is key to the continued success of  FC-TC.

5. Committee Activities

5.a  Previous meetings for the reporting period

5.b Next 12 months of meetings

6  Liaison Activities

FC-TC and its task groups maintain formal or informal liaison with the following organizations. Most liaison representatives are member organizations with representatives in both INCITS FC-TC and the liaison organization.  Liaison relationships vary during the life of relevant projects and are strongest during the development and FC-TC review periods.

INCITS:

Liaison is maintained with INCITS (INternational Committee for Information Technology Standards) to keep the committee informed of the relevant actions of the INCITS organization and the progress of our projects within INCITS. See www.incits.org/ for further information.

TC T10:

Liaison is maintained with INCITS TC T10 (Technical Committee on SCSI Interfaces). The SCSI command set and protocols are carried across the majority of Fibre Channel connections. For more information about T10 see www.t10.org/.

IETF:

Liaison is maintained with four parts of IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), the ips (TCP/IP for storage) working group, the imss (Internet and Management Support for Storage) working group, the pwe3 (Pseudo-wire emulation edge-to-edge) WG, and a more general liaison with the security and transport activities of IETF. 

The IETF ips working group has two projects key to FC-TC. One of those projects, FCIP, is used in the FC-BB-2 standard. The second, iFCP, uses IP infrastructure to support Fibre Channel Fabric capabilities. The majority of the work on those projects is complete, but some management information block (MIB) standards are still in process.  

The IETF imss working group has several projects that are relevant to FC-TC, including several management information block (MIB) definitions. 

The IETF pwe3 working group is preparing standards related to encapsulating Fibre Channel frames over network links other than TCP/IP.

The FC-SP and FC-SP-2 projects make use of much of the work of the security working groups, particularly the ipsec working group. 

FCIA:

Liaison is maintained with the FCIA, the Fibre Channel Industry Association. The FCIA is a trade and technical organization that involves most of the manufacturers of products compliant with FC-TC standards. For FC-TC, one of the most important activities is its Fibre Channel Technology Road Map. The road map provides up-to-date guidance about user requirements for the technologies being standardized by FC-TC. For more information about FCIA, see www.fibrechannel.org/.

SNIA:

Liaison is maintained with SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association. SNIA is a trade and technical organization that addresses the use of Fibre Channel and other technologies for the creation of large storage area networks (SANs). SNIA's technical committees provide many inputs into the FC-TC activities, especially with respect to SAN management functions and the security of SANs. For more information about SNIA, see www.snia.org/.

SFF Committee:

Liaison is maintained with the SFF Committee, formerly named the "Small Form Factor" committee, but now known by its letters. The SFF is an industry organization that documents industry standards in areas typically avoided by accredited standards organizations. Such areas include optical transceiver modules used by Fibre Channel, mechanical standards for Fibre Channel and SCSI storage devices, and connectors for Fibre Channel. Formal liaison is maintained with three SFF Special Subject Working Groups; Transceivers, High Performance Electrical Interconnect, and High Speed Optical Interconnect.  For more information about SFF, see www.sffcommittee.org/ie/.

OIF

Liaison has been initiated with the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), an industry consortium that develops interoperability agreements for data switching and routing using optical networking technologies. The OIF is working on the Common Electrical Interface (CEI) specification that specifies electrical/jitter requirements for 5/10G short reach and long reach copper interconnects. Their work is relevant to FC‑PI‑4.  See www.oiforum.com/.

IEEE 802.1 and 802.3

Liaison is maintained with IEEE 802.  Relevant projects include several IEEE 802.3 projects related to Ethernet and some new IEEE 802.1 projects related to lossless Ethernet implementation that will support FCoE.

See www.ieee802.org/3/ and www.ieee802.org/1/.

IEEE 1619

Liaison is maintained with IEEE 1619.  IEEE 1619 has four projects related to the proper secure protection of data stored on disk and tape media.  

See ieee-p1619.wetpaint.com.

DMTF

Liaison is maintained with the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force), an organization that develops management standards for computer systems and networks based on CIM (Common Information Model). FC-TC is involved with providing the necessary input to DMTF to properly represent and manage storage area networks. For more information about DMTF, see www.dmtf.org/.

INCITS CS1

Liaison is maintained with INCITS CS1.  Relevant projects include FC-SP and FC-SP-2.  For more information about CS1 see cs1.incits.org

7  Membership and Officers

The membership lists for FC-TC are available on the T11 website under the members button. The officers of FC-TC and its TGs are shown below.

A membership list from the Secretariat is also linked to this report.

Officers

8.  Future Trends and Related Technical Activities

The work of FC-TC remains very important because of the requirements of the changing economy and the requirement to protect corporate data. The implementation of Fibre Channel based systems for Storage Area Networks (SANs) has demonstrated that more efficient use can be made of computer and storage resources in many environments. At the same time, the long-distance capabilities provided by Fibre Channel allow high performance mirroring and backup to assure the continuation of normal business in the event of natural or man-made damage to a part of the system. It is likely that both these requirements will continue to build the marketplace for FC-TC technology over the next several years. 

The work is also very important because of the very high bandwidth and transmission efficiency achieved by Fibre Channel implementations.  As computing resources grow more powerful and are distributed across more processors, Fibre Channel is the principal technology capable of meeting the performance and connectivity requirements for storage devices in large enterprise data processing environments.

Other technologies, including TCP/IP and SONET connections, are used to extend SANs even beyond the 80 km distance supported by FC-TC-defined Fibre Channel links. Definition of these technologies will be done within other standards organizations, including IETF, although Fibre Channel specific portions of the work will be done within T11.3 or by liaison with FC-TC.

For the class of servers that use Ethernet as an I/O convergence technology, FCoE will prove to be an exciting new technology.  It is likely to significantly increase the marketplace for Fibre Channel SANs and provide significant cost/performance benefits for a large number of computational environments.  It has already drawn significant interest and several new members to the FC-TC.

The work of FC-TC has also become important because of its contributions to other technologies. It is the basis of 1 Gb/s Ethernet, SATA, SAS, and other technologies. FC-TC's physical layers and signal integrity measurement techniques have been used by a number of technologies in the range of 1 to 8 Gb/s and also at the 12 Gb/s rate achieved by 10 Gb/s Fibre Channel’s more efficient coding technology.

SAN security is beginning to be recognized as a desirable option in many Fibre Channel environments.  The Fibre Channel specific portions of this work are being done in FC-TC.  Much of the standardization is also being done in IEEE, IETF, and INCITS CS1.

The management of SANs will continue to become an increasingly important activity. While it is likely that significant parts of the work will be carried forward within FC-TC, other parts of the work may be carried forward in other standards organizations or industry consortia, including IETF, T10, SNIA, and DMTF. Much of the work specific to Fibre Channel for these broader organizations will be carried on within T11.5 or by liaison with FC-TC.

Bandwidth increases beyond 10 Gb/s have been discussed within T11.2.  A back-compatible 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel  implementation is in development and 16 Gb/s links are also being considered. 

A number of low-cost extensions to Fibre Channel are now in development.  These include low-cost long-distance copper implementations, simplified configuration profiles, and encapsulations of the SATA command set.

Industry consortia remain an important source of new standards activities.  There is a strong desire by many organizations to create more formal standards based on those standards activities.  INCITS fast-track standardization will continue to be an important mechanism for carrying such documents forward into the standards world. 

The heavy workloads and highly technical environments associated with our activities seem tailor-made for interim electronic meetings. We are now making Wi-Fi network access available at all meetings.  Attendance is taken and documents are distributed through the Wi-Fi network.  We have not yet been able to fully exploit electronic meetings, because of restrictions implemented by some corporate firewalls.

9.  Other Administrative Information

Financial Statement:

FC-TC meeting activities are financed and hosted by volunteer organizations. The individual participants and their member organizations finance all travel, room, and related business expenses. FC-TC has no direct financial activities.

Open participation policy:

FC-TC has discovered that the simplest way to meet the goal of a fair and equal opportunity for participation of interested parties is to maintain an open participation policy.  The FC-TC allows the participation of all directly and materially affected parties in any meeting  with very few exceptions.  Any interested party may access the documents provided during the development process, the agenda and minutes of the meetings, and the draft of standards in development.  Any interested party may join the announcement and discussion e-mail reflectors. For those documents from other organizations that are being considered as part of a liaison activity, the contributing organization may request that the FC-TC protect these documents with a password.  Any interested party may attend the FC-TC meetings.  Constructive contributions from non-member companies, including papers and meeting attendance, are welcomed by the committee, since such contributions often provide technical review, insights, and expertise not available within the committee.  All frequent participants are encouraged to become voting members of the committee and most actually do become members.  As an example, at the June, 2007 plenary meeting, of the 45 attendees, 1 was attending for the first time, 1 was a member of TG T11.2, and the remaining 43 were representatives of  FC-TC members.  Voting and advisory membership is closely monitored to be sure that only fully qualified members participate in voting.

FC-TC believes that such an open participation policy is vital to the success of the committee.

Web-based procedures:

FC-TC made a major transition in 1998 from paper-based operating procedures to completely web-based, interactive procedures. The web-based system has been improved continuously since that time such that it now provides, among others, the following critical capabilities.  These capabilities require wireless access at all meeting venues.

An online document register allows documents to be numbered automatically, submitted via ftp or web-based utilities, and linked into the register for web access. Documents distinguished as agendas or minutes are given special forms and simplified access procedures. The documents and document database may be accessed through a number of different indexes.  Automated procedures are in place for preparing document mailings, accessing archives, and performing backups.

A database provides access to contact information for all attendees of any FC-TC plenary meeting and for all representatives of TC or TG member organizations.  Individuals may update their access information on line using password protected procedures.  Representatives of member organizations may update their representation information, but only officers may change the status of a member organization.  Update information is automatically transmitted to INCITS.

Letter balloting and comment collection is performed using an automated procedure.

Meeting announcements are submitted to a special data base, from which schedules and automated notifications are prepared.

Attendance for all meetings is taken electronically.  If network access is not available, meeting attendance may be taken using a special java-enabled USB storage device.

Documents are distributed during meetings by Wi-Fi network access and by USB storage device.

Special capabilities are provided for the officers, the administrator, and INCITS to facilitate access to particular sets of required information.  As an example, access to all annual reports is provided at the webpage www.t11.org/t11/docreg.nsf/ar.

All FC-TC documents are provided electronically in accordance with guidelines established by the TC. Additional procedures have been established for T11.3 to fully exploit the capabilities of electronic distribution. These procedures, documented in T11/02-223v0 are being considered as procedures for FC-TC and its other task groups as well.

The website and e-mail reflectors are presently administered entirely by volunteers and financed by corporate donations. If the required functionality can be provided, we look forward to INCITS providing support for hosting our web-site and mail reflectors in the future.

Recommendations:

If a system having the proper open participation policies and the necessary support features can be developed, the FC-TC hopes that INCITS will pick up web-site, data-base, and mail reflector hosting responsibilities in the future.

We hope that an intellectual property process compatible with ISO will be created in the future.

Registration procedures for the OID, IEEE Auto-negotiation parameters, and possible future registries should be established as soon as possible.

We expect that the INCITS policies will continue to allow open participation in TC and TG activities.  A more restrictive policy would be detrimental to the success of our standards activities.