By Siobhan Kennedy
The group behind the next generation Future I/O architecture received its biggest endorsement to date yesterday when networking giant Cisco Systems Inc announced it would support the specification over a rival architecture from Intel Corp. The news came at a developers conference in Santa Clara, California when the Future I/O group’s founding members, Compaq Computer Corp, IBM Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co, along with Adaptec Inc and 3Com Corp, published the first draft of the much-hyped server specification, promising unparalleled performance, reliability, salability and security. Cisco Systems Inc will join the group as the sixth member of its steering committee, leaving three spaces still left unfilled.
Future I/O is a standard designed to increase the overall performance of data transfers between servers and peripheral devices in a network. Whereas current PCI buses provide 500 Mbps of usable bandwidth between devices, I/O subsystems based on Future I/O are expected to support 2.5Gbps data transfers which the group says is five times faster than Intel’s NGIO (Next Generation Input/Output) spec.
Speaking to ComputerWire yesterday, Frank Maly, director of marketing for Cisco’s interworks business division said the company had chosen to go with Future I/O because the specification will utilize the latest version of Internet Protocol, IPv6, which Intel’s rival spec will not, at least in its first iteration.
Having IPv6 incorporated in the spec will enable customers to tightly couple their I/O based server-to-server, and server-to- storage networks with their data networking infrastructure. Today companies typically have to keep these networks separate, which is more expensive, but combining the two will enable businesses to use the internet to carry out such tasks as back-up and disaster recovery.
We’re trying to take all the back end networking for I/O and move it to the data networking infrastructure, so it all runs over the same wires, Maly said. Maly cited an example of a disaster recovery scenario. Right now, if a disk array systems goes down, you can back up to remote system, but that typically happens over a private network, using proprietary protocols. Future I/O will enable that back up procedure to happen over the internet, with the I/O traffic being switched across via a Cisco – or any other manufacturer’s – router, he said.
Maly said he’d only seen what’s so far been made publicly available on Intel’s NGIO spec, but that he believes that it’s not based on IP. Moreover, he said that Intel was planning to come out with its own proprietary layer 3 protocol, which it will incorporate into NGIO, but which would be a rival to IPv6. It comes back to what the standards are going to do for our customers, Maly continued, the whole idea is to increase bandwidth, increase availability and converge I/O and data networks, it’s what our customers need. So if NGIO is not going to address all these things, then Cisco is probably not going to be interested.
Maly said that Cisco had not yet defined exactly what solution it will build to incorporate Future I/O technology. At the moment, the company is just helping to compile the standard he said, adding that one of Cisco’s engineers already sits on the IPv6 working group. But he said that Cisco will make devices, probably routers or switches, which take the Future I/O data and bridge it over the internet.
Tom Bradicich, IBM’s director of architecture and technology for its Netfinity line of servers and a spokesperson for the group, said the 300-page spec has been released to the six steering group members plus the seventy-five other companies which have signed up and expressed an interest in the architecture since its introduction in January. The companies will then provide feedback on the spec, which will be incorporated and released in the second draft, this August. The final version will be introduced in December and vendors are expected to start showing prototype products throughout the year 2000, with final product roll-out in 2001, Bradicich said.
In addition, Future I/O will be incorporated into a special interest group (SIG), to which all interest third parties, plus the core six vendors, will have to pay an annual fee to be a member. Of the three steering committee spaces left, Bradicich said that Intel had been invited to take one of the places, but with the continuing battle between the rival I/O camps, it doesn’t look as if that will happen, at least not in the near future. Bradicich added that the group expects to make an announcement about two of the members some time later this summer.
A spokesperson for Intel said the chipmaker hadn’t as yet made any decisions as to whether or not it would support IPv6, but added that the IP specification was nowhere near being a done deal, and a long way down the road from being implemented. As Intel’s NGIO architecture will be released next year, he said the company had to go with what’s available today and then make a decision later about IPv6, when it becomes available.
