Fibre Channel (FC)
The information explosion and the need for high-performance communications for server-to-storage and server-to-server networking have been the focus of much attention for this new millennium. Performance improvements in storage, processors, and workstations, along with the move to distributed architectures such as client/server, have spawned increasingly data-intensive and high-speed networking applications. The interconnect between these systems and their input/output devices demands a new level of performance in reliability, speed, and distance. Fibre Channel, a highly-reliable, interconnect technology allows concurrent communications among workstations, mainframes, servers, data storage systems, and other peripherals using SCSI, IP and a wide range of other protocols to meet the needs of the data centre. It provides interconnect systems for multiple topologies that can scale to a total system bandwidth on the order of a terabit per second. Fibre Channel is the premier technique for storage area networking (SAN) and has proven its ability to deliver a new level of reliability, availability, security and both scalable throughput and capacity. Switches, hubs, storage systems, storage devices, adapters, and management software are among the products that are on the market today, providing the ability to implement a total system solution. These solutions powered by Fibre Channel deliver capabilities for storage networking, cluster computing and network interconnect to meet the IT needs of organizations around the world.
Why Fibre Channel?
Fibre Channel is the solution for IT professionals who need reliable, cost-effective information storage and delivery high speeds. With development started in 1988 and ANSI standard approval in 1994, Fibre Channel is a mature, safe solution for server to storage communications.
Today's data growth presents unprecedented challenges incorporating a wide range of application requirements such as database and file management, transaction processing, data warehousing, imaging, integrated audio/video, networked storage, real-time computing, collaborative projects and CAD/CAE. Fibre Channel is simply the easiest, most reliable solution for information storage and retrieval.
Fibre Channel economically and practically meets today’s challenges such as price performance leadership, solution leadership for Storage Area Networks (SAN’s), reliability from more than 20 years of development, bandwidth with today’s technology running at 4 & 8Gb/s, scalability from point to point links to integrated enterprises with hundreds of servers, congestion free ensuring data reaches it’s destination as quickly and securely as possible and finally highly efficient in terms of transmission overheads.
Lastly information management is a key factor for organizations today and Fibre Channel enhances businesses ability to access and protect their data more efficiently by high performance storage consolidation, centralised management of servers and storage assets, back up and recovery, virtualisation, server clustering, SAN integration, data centres & high performance workgroups focused at audio and video content creation.
