May 2001 Minutes
IEEE Computer Society
Storage System Standards
Working Group
(P1244, P1563)

Minutes
Meeting held July 17-19, 2001
At the Offices of Legato, Inc., Louisville, Colorado, USA

Jack Cole, IEEE Sponsor
Curtis Anderson, SSSWG Chair; Alan Rollow, SSSWG Vice Chair

1244.1  Architecture/Data Model
        Geoff Peck (principal), Curtis Anderson, Joel Williams,
        Murali Sathyanarayana
1244.2  Session Security, Authentication, and Initialization Protocol
        Bruce Haddon (principal 2000-), Jan Klier (principal 1997-2000),
        Curtis Anderson, Joel Williams
1244.3  Media Management Protocol
        Murali Sathyanarayana (principal), Curtis Anderson, Joel Williams
1244.4  Drive Management Protocol
        Joel Williams
1244.5  Library Management Protocol
        Joel Williams
1244.6  Media Manager Interchange Protocol
        Joel Williams (principal), Curtis Anderson
1244.7  Media Manager Control Interface Protocol
        no current editor
1244.8  The C Language Procedural Interface
        Paul Lockwood
1244.9  MMS User Mount Commands
        Alan Rollow
1244.10 MMS Standard Administrative and Operational Commands
        Alan Rollow
1244.11 MOVER
        Joel Williams
New Features List
        Curtis Anderson

ATTENDANCE (5).

• Minutes from the May meeting were approved without change.

• Alan presided. Curtis attended by teleconferencing.
  

• 1244.4 "Drive Management Protocol" - Paul brought up an issue with PCLs and Slot types and how they are used in the DMP Load and Attach comands. Does the DMP Load command need the "modename" feature of the DMP Attach command in order to support the wide variety of drive types in the field? The group needed more time than was available in the meeting to consider the question.
  

• 1244.6 "Data export/import" - No discussion.

• 1244.8 "C Language API" - No discussion.
  

• 1244.9 & 1244.10 "User and Admin CLI" - The group talked about what options should be allowed on mmsadmin sub-commands: hello, etc. It was decided that absent Disconnect/Reconnect needs, these sub-commands wouldn't be allowed on the CLI.  However, this brought up the discussion of what Disconnect/Reconnect required (see below).  We then worked through the hello, goodbye, locale, privilege and cancel commands. It was also observed that the mmsadmin command should always run with raised privilege.  The privilege command can be used lower it interactively if desired.
  

• 1244.11 "Mover" - Joel passed out copies of Draft 5 of the Mover document.  The group walked through the document reviewing and editing along the way.  The over-the-wire protocol was changed to include connection information for each operation.  The support for read and write operations was changed to use size_t for length and return value. The positioning function was changed to query for absolute position and to allow use of that value later for those devices which support this feature.  Assorted other clean-ups were done with error indications and enhanced features for ieee_mms_control().
  

• The group discussed the implementation difficulty of Mover clients in a SAN where each connected host may have slightly different tape handling semantics.  The question/comment came up of whether the common tape semantics standards (IEEE 1563) would help in making Mover implementation easier.  Another question was raised on whether changes to DMP would allow better support for the remote side of the Mover. The group will try to resolve those questions before the next meeting.
  

• 1244 Futures, "Session Disconnect/Reconnect" - The group reviewed the two options for inclusion of this functionality, creating new MMP commands for disconnect and reconnect versus adding options to the existing goodbye and hello commands, and came back to the plan-of-record of adding options to the existing goodby and hello commands.
  

• 1244 Futures, "Event Notification Model" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "Central Configuration Management" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "LM-Based Drive Selection" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "Automatic Interlibrary Transfer" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "Fine Grained Security" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "Migrate Control" - No discussion.

• 1244 Futures, "Self Description" - No discussion.

• 1563.1 & 1563.2 & 1563.3 "Tape Standards" - No discussion.
  

• Joel now has Word versions of the final published standards docs that we can use as the basis for future document versions.
  

• Related Standards Organizations - The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Storage Media Library Working Group (SMLWG) has reawakened their project to support standardized management of Removeable Media Management systems via their Common Information Model (CIM).  They will be asking the management framework vendors such as BMC, Unicenter, et al, for input on how important this ability is and how much support they can lend to the effort.  See http://www.snia.org for more information.
  

• Next Meeting:   ** NOTE CHANGE IN LOCATION **
  September 18-20 on the East Coast (Greater Boston or Greater D.C.)
  

• Future Meetings:
          November - Looking for suggestions.

Important links:
http://www.SSSWG.org - Our working group's web site
http://StorageConference.org - NASA-IEEE Mass Storage Conference
To be held in College Park, MD from 5/16-5/20, 2002.
http://www.IEEE-SSSC.org - IEEE Storage Standards Steering Committee
http://www.SNIA.org - Storage Networking Industry Association

Active discussion continues on the above topics on the email reflector
"work@ssswg.org". Please subscribe if you are interested in hearing more
by sending email to "majordomo@ssswg.org" with a body of "subscribe work". 

SSSWG Home