3.3 Advantages of Fibre Channel for Mass Storage

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There are some definite advantages to using Fibre Channel over other architectures. Although this is not an all-inclusive list, these are the major advantages:

3.3.1 Distance

Hewlett-Packard supports up to 10,000 meters (10 km) between the computer (or system) and the peripheral. What this means is that between the computer and the peripheral there can be a distance of 10 kilometers. Section 3.5 will describe this in more detail, however, the distance advantage is an excellent solution for the campus-type environment.

3.3.2 Speed

Fibre Channel permits a theoretical speed of up to 4000 Mbps. (As mentioned previously, Hewlett-Packard supports 1063 Mbps.) Speeds depend greatly on the design of the pieces and parts that are connected within the topology between the computer and the peripheral. Our challenge within the industry now is to determine how to achieve these higher speeds allowed by the Fibre Channel standard. This speaks directly to performance, because with the speeds capable with Fibre Channel throughput increases by four or five times over current channels.

3.3.3 Connectivity and Scalability

Computer system environments today are very limited in the number of devices that can be connected together. They are also limited in that today s configurations do not easily allow the introduction of new technologies, protocols, or even different protocols simultaneously .

Fibre Channel addresses these issues by allowing:

from 2 to over 16 million ports that can be concurrently logged in to a fabric with the 24-bit address identifier
the introduction of new technologies like laser light
the transportation of different protocols simultaneously

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