Protocol Action: FC Frame Encapsulation to Proposed Standard

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

 The IESG has approved publication of the following Internet-Drafts as
 Proposed Standards:


   o FC Frame Encapsulation <draft-ietf-ips-fcencapsulation-08.txt>

   o Fibre Channel Over TCP/IP (FCIP) <draft-ietf-ips-fcovertcpip-12.txt> 

   o iFCP - A Protocol for Internet Fibre Channel Storage Networking
       <draft-ietf-ips-ifcp-13.txt>


 This document is the product of the IP Storage Working Group.
 The IESG contact persons are Scott Bradner and Allison Mankin.
   
 Technical Summary

The Fibre Channel (CC) frame encapsulation document specifies the 
common format and a procedure for the measurement and calculation of 
frame transit time through the IP network. This specification is used
by the other two protocols (and any others in future).

The Fibre Channel over TCP/IP (FCIP) 

The iFCP specification document specifies the 
encapsulation of frames among FC storage area networks (SANs) through 
gateways that are interconnected with TCP/IP networks. 


Two significant steps were taken by with Fibre Channel technology with
these protocols: adoption of TCP transport between the devices and
clients (or gateways in the case of iFCP), and adoption of strong 
security threat models and mandatory to implement encryption and 
integrity. The TCP usage provides congestion avoidance, which is needed 
since the "bus" is a network and congestion and usage are less 
predictable than they were in the pre-IP-storage technology.

The security threat models and requirements are provided in these 
drafts as the primary, but with more detail in the document Securing 
Block Storage Protocol over IP (a misnomer, since TCP is the transport, 
of course :). A detailed configuration of required usage for IPsec and
IKE is described, along with motivation.
   
 Working Group Summary

There was strong Working Group Consensus for these documents, and
they had strong consensus from the industry, community and IETF Last 
Calls
   
   
 Protocol Quality
   
These documents were reviewed for the IESG by Elizabeth Rodriguez 
and Allison Mankin. Implementations are known to be interoperating.

RFC Editor Note:

RFC Editor, Please place the following note at the beginning of 
Section 5.1, FC Frame Content, of draft-ietf-ips-fcencapsulation,
and at the beginning of APPENDIX F - FC FRAME FORMAT, of 
draft-ietf-ips-fcovertcpip.

	NOTE: All uses of the words "character" or "characters" in 
	this section refer to 8bit/10bit link encoding wherein each 
	8 bit "character" within a link frame is encoded as a 10 bit 
	"character" for link transmission. These words do not refer to 
	ASCII, Unicode, or any other form of text characters, although
      octets from such characters will occur as 8 bit "characters" 
	for this encoding. This usage is employed here for consistency
      with the ANSI T11 standards that specify Fibre Channel.