s up to 40 MB per second with a connectivity distance [between server and storage] of about 25 meters. Fibre channel offers m
aximum performance of 100 MB per second and a distance of 10 kilometers.
In the early stages of Fibre channel products, we're not going to get the ten kilometers distance initially. You can expect initial products to support up to 500 meters, which will be followed closely after that by 2 kilometers. But I think that just going past that 25 meters is really a great advantage for users. Going beyond 25 meters lets you get more of a distributed storage architecture than you've had in the past, especially in a campus environment where you can run from one end of the campus to the other.
BYTE:
What are the advantages of that type architecture?
Lofgren:
The advantages of Fibre Channel are in performance, distance, connectivity, and flexibility. One very simplistic example is physical configuration. If you have multiple servers and multiple storage devices, you need space to store all those systems. There's a physical footprint issue here. If the se
rver can only be up to 25 meters away from the storage device, that really limits where you are physically locating these systems. Because Fibre Channel increases the distance between servers and storage, you can, for example, now put all your storage in one central area. Or, if you're in a campus environment and you want to have some type of failover capability from one part of the campus to the other, or do a backup from one side of the campus to the other side of the campus, Fibre Channel will let you do that. The flexibility gives us choices, which is a great appeal to end users and allows you to do many different things.
BYTE:
You've talked about Fibre channel networking. What is that and how does it make things better?
Lofgren:
Many Fibre Channel discussions revolve around the interconnect and replacing SCSI to give you the performance and connecitivity which we just discussed. But I look at that as the first phase. The next big step is going with the networkin
g philosophy. The Fibre Channel interconnect is a point-to-point interconnect (from a server to a storage node). But what happens when you have multiple servers and multiple storage devices? You want to find a way to give one server access to multiple storage devices. You could do that over your LAN, but then you have a bandwidth limitation. The network becomes the I/O bottleneck.
But if we put traditional networking components, such as switches and hubs, into our storage infrastructure, that lets you connect to multiple servers with multiple storage devices. This will have somewhat the same look that you have in your LAN and WAN environment, except now it's part of your storage infrastructure, your servers and storage devices. A very important point here is the flexibility. One of the things it lets you do is move toward application specific storage devices. Fibre channel's flexibility lets you introduce a much more modular building block type of architecture. You can tune it more toward specific appl
ications.
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More Powerful, Flexible Storage
