Fibre Channel Primer

Fibre Channel: Connection to the Future

FIBRE CHANNEL SYSTEMS

Fibre Channel systems are assembled from adapters, hubs, storage, and

switches. Host bus adapters are installed into hosts in the same manner as

a SCSI host bus adapter or a network interface card. Hubs link individual

elements together to form a shared bandwidth loop. Disk systems integrate

a loop into a storage backplane. A port bypass circuit provides the ability

to hot swap Fibre Channel disks and links to a hub. Fibre Channel switches

provide scalable systems of almost any size.

IT systems today require an order of magnitude improvement in

performance. High-performance, gigabit-per-second Fibre Channel meets

this requirement. Fibre Channel is one of the most reliable, scalable, gigabit

communications technologies today. It was designed by the computer

industry for high-performance communications, and no other technology

matches its total system solution capabilities.

Figure 1.2 Fibre Channel systems are built from familiar elements

IBM

Host bus adapters

install like any NIC

or SCSI host bus

adapter

Hub: Cascadable,

up to 126 devices

in loop

RAID with Fibre

Channel interface

Servers: SCSI over Fibre Channel for storage

and TCP/IP for servers and workstations

Workstations: Cluster

computing and fast data

transfer.

NL_Port

FL_Port

N_Port

F_Port

Switch: Cascadable,

10s to 1000s of ports

Fibre

Channel

storage

system:

100 MB/s

redundant

loops. Hot

swap disks.

NL_Port