Subject: Network Data Management Protocol announcement

From: "Skardal, Harald" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 11:48:48 -0800

This is an announcement of a new standards effort for NDMP,
Network Data Management Protocol, version 4. We are hoping to 
start up an NDMP effort under the IETF. We would appreciate 
if anyone interested in the areas of data management, 
including archival, backup, restore, replication, 
mirroring, would review and consider participating in this effort.
The following summarize the status of NDMP:

- A new draft, draft-ndmpv4-001.txt is in the process of 
becoming available in the IETF drafts directory.

- The NDMP effort was started in 1996. Currently NDMP versions 2 
and 3 are supported by more than 10 vendors of disk and tape 
based storage systems, as well as vendors of data management 
applications. More than 5 additional companies are implementing 
NDMP based products for the first time. 

- The version 4 draft has been produced by a group of 
approx. 10 people representing 6 companies. 
Several others have contributed in the review of the 
draft in weekly teleconferences and on the mailing list. 

- The effort has been organized through the mailing list 
[email-masked], and the web site www.ndmp.org. 
The web site has email archives going back to the 
work on version 2, as well as a number of "backgrounder"
documents for version 4 as well as future NDMP work.
  
- As an introduction to the protocol, first read the 
abstract of the draft:

 Abstract 
    The Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP) is an open 
    protocol for enterprise wide network based data management. 
    NDMP defines a TCP/IP based mechanism for 
    controlling the transfer of data between 
    primary and secondary storage subsystems on behalf of 
    data archival or backup and recovery operations.  NDMP provides 
    architectural separation of the network attached Data 
    Management Application (DMA), Data Servers and Tape Servers 
    participating in archival or recovery operations. 
    NDMP also provides low level control
    of tape devices and tape library robotics on behalf of 
    DMAs. Multi-vendor interoperability and extensibility 
    are key goals of NDMP. 

To further clarify:
 
  1: NDMP is focused on allowing a data management 
  application to set up and *manage* a data 
  management session, such as backup, between a 
  source and a target.
  The source can be a server with direct attached storage 
  or a file server appliance. The target can be a 
  server with a tape drive, or a tape library appliance.

  2: NDMP is agnostic to the data format sent from the 
  source to the target.

  3: NDMP is agnostic to the transport mechanism used to 
  transport the data between source and target.

- There is storage related work under way in the IP Storage working 
groups. The two existing drafts: "Fibre Channel over TCP/IP", and
"iSCSI" focuses on the transport of the data over the Internet. NDMP
focuses on the control of the participating parties in the session.
It is therefore our understanding that NDMP is orthogonal 
to ongoing storage related work in the IETF.

- There is work going on in the IETF in the area of "reliable sever 
pooling" (RSERPOOL). Although the goal is for NDMP sessions to be 
"highly reliable applications", there does not seem to be any direct
connection between RSERPOOL and NDMP.

We ask that all interested parties contact the NDMP group
by sending email to [email-masked]. One can be added to this
mailing list from the "NDMP Initiative" page on www.ndmp.org.  

We will have a discussion on the [email-masked] mailing list to 
decide which are the appropriate next steps to take.

On behalf of the NDMP effort,

	Harald Skardal

      Harald Skardal,
      Network Appliance Inc.,
      Email: [email-masked],
      Tel: 603.882.3881,
      Cel: 603.566.3027.