8.1. Fibre Channel Benefits

Fibre Channel provides benefits in performance, availability, scalability, flexibility, and distance between nodes.

8.1.1 Performance

The current Fibre Channel throughput standard is 100MB/s net user payload. ANSI has defined Fibre Channel throughput standards for 200MB/s and 400MB/s.

Fibre Channel technology provides the fundamental building blocks of storage area networks (SANs), Enterprise Network Storage Architecture (ENSA), and many high-availability and clustering implementations.

Note

These rates are for half-duplex transmission. Full-duplex transmission doubles throughput.

8.1.2 Availability

Fibre Channel also provides the following availability advantages:

• Hot-swappable support

• Built-in robustness (error detection and correction through the 8-bit/10-bit encoding/decoding), which allows for inexpensive implementation and low protocol overhead

• Wide industry support

8.1.3 Scalability

Fibre Channel technology enhances scalability by providing the following:

• Increased storage capacity per expansion slot

• 126 nodes on a Fibre Channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL)

• 16 million nodes on a Fibre Channel switched fabric (FC-SW)

8.1.4 Flexibility

Fibre Channel technology greatly enhances flexibility by providing the following advantages:

• Protocol independence

• Flexible wiring and small connectors

• No bus termination necessary

• Multiple topologies (point to point, arbitrated loop, and switched fabric)

• Unification of networking and I/O channel data communications

• Flexible transmission service

• Dedicated bandwidth

• Multiplexed transmission with multiple source or destination ports with acknowledgment

• Best-effort multiplexed datagram transmission without acknowledgment

8.1.5 Distance

Fibre Channel provides the following:

• 30m between nodes with copper cabling

• 500m between nodes with multimode cabling and shortwave lasers

• 10km between nodes with single-mode cabling and longwave lasers (Enhancements currently under development or already available can increase this distance.)

Note

For more information on Fibre Channel standards, access the Fibre Channel Industry Association Web site at http://www.fibrechannel.org.