Fibre Channel Primer

2 Fibre Channel: Connection to the Future
l Congestion Free – Fibre Channel’s credit-based flow control
delivers data as fast as the destination buffer is able to receive it.
l High Efficiency – Real price performance is directly correlated to
the efficiency of the technology. Fibre Channel has very little
transmission overhead, offering the capability to deliver very high,
sustained utilization rates without loss of data. Most important, the
Fibre Channel protocol is specifically designed for highly efficient
operation using hardware.
WHY FIBRE CHANNEL?
Never before have we witnessed today’s growth rate of storage capacity
and distributed applications that rely so completely on high-speed
communications. Visionaries in the computer industry saw this coming in
the 1980s and initiated the development of a new standard to answer the
data transfer requirements of this new trend. The core Fibre Channel
standard, ANSI X3.230-1994, was the result.
In fact, multiple terabytes of Fibre Channel interfaced storage
are installed every day. Fibre Channel works equally well for storage,
networks, video, data acquisition, and many other applications. Fibre
Channel is ideal for reliable, high-speed transport of digital audio/
video. Aerospace developers are using Fibre Channel for ultra-reliable,
real-time networking, as well as for low-latency, high-throughput signal
processing applications.
Fibre Channel is a fast, reliable data transport system that scales
to meet the requirements of any enterprise. Today, installations range
from small post-production systems on Fibre Channel loops to very
large CAD systems linking thousands of users into a switched, Fibre
Channel network.
Fibre Channel is ideal for these applications:
l High-performance storage
l Large databases and data warehouses
l Storage backup systems and recovery
l Server clusters
l Network-based storage