Chapter 5. Fibre Channel Products

Fibre Channel SANS are composed of various hardware and software products, which at the same time complement one another and compete for space in the storage solutions market. The manufacturers of Fibre Channel products go to market along various paths, including large original equipment manufacturer (OEM) contracts with solutions providers (Dell, HP, IBM, Sun, and so on), arrangements with value-added reseller (VAR) and reseller channels, and direct sales to corporate accounts. With the diversity of products required to create an operational storage network, OEMs and integrators have relationships with a spectrum of vendors and must certify interoperability before solutions are taken to market.

Closer cooperation between noncompeting vendors such as manufacturers of HBAs, switches, storage products, and software has promoted lower-level interoperability between the essential components of a SAN interconnection. Additionally, a few vendors have made substantial investments in their own verification labs to ensure that their products will work with others. Interoperability of Fibre Channel products has also been encouraged by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). The FCIA has developed the SANmark framework to provide validation of standards compliance at various levels of SAN functionality. The SANmark Conformance Documents (SCDs) cover Fibre Channel standards compliance from lower-level physical layers and protocols to upper-layer storage applications such as clustering and backup. Products that bear the SANmark label have at least demonstrated basic standards compliance, something that hopefully translates into interoperability.

The spectrum of hardware components extends from transceivers to enterprise-class storage arrays. Transceivers, HBAs, loop hubs, and fabrics inter connect Fibre Channel-enabled RAIDs, JBODs, Fibre Channel-to-SCSI bridges, and native Fibre Channel tape subsystems. Software components include device drivers that are supplied with HBAs, management software for hubs and switches, file and volume management applications, storage resource management, failover software, and SAN-ready tape backup applications. These hardware and software categories are discussed later in this chapter, but because the Fibre Channel market, like other markets, is subject to mergers and acquisitions and changes in vendor identity, I emphasize the useful features of each product type and not the responsible vendor. In selecting particular products, the SAN designer should conduct the usual inquisition to grill vendors on their actual product features and functionality. A list of vendors and corresponding product categories is given in Appendix B.