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Chapter Syllabus
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
Fibre Channel is an integrated set of standards developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Fibre Channel technology is an industry-standard interconnect serial data transfer architecture that delivers a high level of reliability, throughput, and distance flexibility for the server industry. Fibre Channel uses fiber optics to provide an interconnection scheme among devices. It enables rapid delivery of large amounts of data by supporting high-performance protocols, such as Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Small Computer System Interface (SCSI). As shown in Figure 8-1, a complete Fibre Channel solution includes hardware platforms, storage systems, operating systems, and applications. Figure 8-1. StorageWorks Fibre Channel solution.A Fibre Channel solution is hardware-intensive and operates among only a few devices with predefined addresses. Data communication on a Fibre Channel system occurs over a direct or switched point-to-point connection between the communicating devices. As a result, Fibre Channel systems transport data at a high speed with low overhead. In comparison, computer networks handle a more extensive range of tasks than Fibre Channel systems because the operating system translates and converts data across several layers of the network. Because a network is software-intensive, it has a relatively high overhead. |
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