Fibre Channel - History

History

Fibre Channel started in 1988, with ANSI standard approval in 1994, as a way to simplify the HIPPI system then in use for similar roles. HIPPI used a massive 50-pair cable with bulky connectors, and had limited cable lengths. When Fibre Channel started to compete for the mass storage market its primary competitor was IBM's proprietary Serial Storage Architecture (SSA) interface. Eventually the market chose Fibre Channel over SSA, depriving IBM of control over the next generation of mid- to high-end storage technology. Fibre Channel was primarily concerned with simplifying the connections and increasing distances, as opposed to increasing speeds. Later, designers added the goals of connecting SCSI disk storage, providing higher speeds and far greater numbers of connected devices.

It also added support for any number of "upper layer" protocols, including ATM, IP and FICON, with SCSI being the predominant usage.

The Fibre Channel protocol has a rich roadmap of speeds on a variety of underlying transport media. For example, the following table shows native Fibre Channel speed variants:

Fibre Channel Variants
NAME Line-Rate (GBaud) Throughput (full duplex) (MBps)* Availability
1GFC 1.0625 200 1997
2GFC 2.125 400 2001
4GFC 4.25 800 2004
8GFC 8.5 1600 2005
10GFC 10.52 2550 2008
16GFC 14.025 3200 2011
32GFC 28.05 6400 2014

* – Throughput for duplex connections

Read more about this topic:  Fibre Channel

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