PSARC/2009/111: SRP Target in Comstar

One of the nice things you get with Infiband is the capability to do RDMA: You could copy from one system to another directly without involving the operating system. Thus this way of communication is a really efficient one compared to the overhead of using the TCP/IP stack. With Build 116 we will see a SRP Target for the COMSTAR framework in Opensolaris. So you could use iSER as well as SRP to transmit and receive SCSI commands and the data via Infiniband and RDMA. Now there is the question, why you have two similar technologies in the kernel. Well … not all operating system provide an initiator for both protocols. VMware just supports SRP but not iSER. In any case Infiniband starts to get an really interesting SAN media alternative or a valid media for single-fabric datacenters with the widespread support of Storage over IB protocols in various operating system.