Fibre Channel Primer

17 Chapter 3: Fibre Channel Overview
Fibre Channel
loop integrated into
backplane
100 MB/s full
duplex I/O
Redundant loops
Figure 3.1 Fibre Channel disks define a new standard of performance
STORAGE
Fibre Channel is the next storage interface. Fibre Channel has been
adopted by the major computer systems and storage manufacturers
as the next technology for enterprise storage. It eliminates distance,
bandwidth, scalability, and reliability limitations of SCSI.
Storage Devices and Systems:
Fibre Channel is being provided as a standard disk interface.
Industry leading RAID manufacturers are shipping Fibre Channel
systems. Soon, RAID providers will not be regarded as viable vendors
unless they offer Fibre Channel.
Storage Area Network (SAN):
The network behind the servers linking one or more servers to
one or more storage systems is the SAN. Each storage system could
be RAID, tape backup, tape library, CD-ROM library, or JBOD (Just
a Bunch of Disks). Fibre Channel networks are robust and resilient,
with these features:
l Shared storage among systems
l Independent scaling of server and storage capacities
l High performance
l Robust data integrity and reliability
l Fast data access and backup
Hot swap