What I’m working on at the moment

In case you’re interested, here’s a brief teaser for what I’m working on at the moment.You’re probably aware that I’ve been working on Sun’s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) support since November 2006 along with my fellow team members in Melbourne and Beijing. You can read the flag-day message or grab a copy of snv_66 which includes the post-flagday sundries (cough!).We’ve now picked up phase-II of this project, one part of which is implementing the SAS Serial Management Protocol (smp). I’m sketching out a design for a userland interface to an smp driver so that we can write userland applications to actually make use of the seriously cool functionality which the spec provides for in Serial Attached SCSI-2 (SAS-2).Having worked in the Fibre Channel area for a while and knowing FC fabric reasonably well, it is very interesting to see how the two protocols are both similar and different when it comes to configuration management. Fibre Channel has the “fabric” concept whereby the devices you see are part of zones. SAS has the Domain concept and also has zones. The zoning doesn’t appear to be as well developed as for FC at this point, probably because SAS is still newish to the market and I don’t think there have been as many manufacturers for hbas, arrays and jbods enter the market. I expect that to change in the next few years, and I’m really excited at being able to get into the area at almost the ground level.