{"id":97,"date":"2010-04-19T15:16:42","date_gmt":"2010-04-19T23:16:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/?p=97"},"modified":"2010-04-19T15:16:42","modified_gmt":"2010-04-19T23:16:42","slug":"rocky-roads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/2010\/04\/19\/rocky-roads\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocky roads"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw that the InfiniBand Trade Association announced the “RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)<\/a>” specification today.\u00a0 I’ve already discussed<\/a> my thoughts on the underlying technology (although I have a bit more to say), so for now I just want to say that I really, truly hate the name they chose.\u00a0 There are at least two things that suck about the name:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Calling the technology “RDMA over” instead of “InfiniBand over” is overly vague and intentionally deceptive.\u00a0 We already have “RDMA over Ethernet” — except we’ve been calling it iWARP.\u00a0 Choosing “RoCE” is somewhat like talking about “Storage over Ethernet” instead of “Fibre Channel over Ethernet.”\u00a0 Sure, FCoE is storage over ethernet, but so is iSCSI.\u00a0 As for the intentionally deceptive part: I’ve been told that “InfiniBand” was left out of the name because the InfiniBand Trade Association felt that InfiniBand is viewed negatively in some of the markets they’re going after.\u00a0 What does that say about your marketing when you are running away from your own main trademark?<\/li>\n
  2. The term “Converged Ethernet” is also pretty meaningless.\u00a0 The actual technology has nothing to do with “converged” ethernet (whatever that is, exactly); the annex that was just release simply describes how to stick InfiniBand packets inside a MAC header and Ethernet FCS, so simply “Ethernet” would be more accurate.\u00a0 At least the “CE” part is an improvement over the previous try, “Converged Enhanced Ethernet” or “CEE”; not only does the technology have nothing to do with CEE either, “CEE” was an IBM-specific marketing term for what eventually became Data Center Bridging or “DCB.”\u00a0 (At Cisco we used to use the term “Data Center Ethernet” or “DCE”)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    So both the “R” and the “CE” of “RoCE” aren’t very good choices.\u00a0 It would be a lot clearer and more intellectually honest if we could just call InfiniBand over Ethernet by its proper name: IBoE.\u00a0 And explaining the technology would be a bit simpler too, since the analogy with FCoE becomes a lot more explicit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I saw that the InfiniBand Trade Association announced the “RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE)” specification today.\u00a0 I’ve already discussed my thoughts on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[11,12,18,19],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-infiniband","category-rdma","tag-dcb","tag-iboe","tag-infiniband","tag-rdma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":629,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalvampire.org\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}