Fibre Channel
Today, the term host bus adapter (HBA) is most often used to refer to a Fibre Channel interface card. Fibre Channel HBAs are available for all major open systems, computer architectures, and buses, including PCI and SBus (obsolete today). Each HBA has a unique World Wide Name (WWN), which is similar to an Ethernet MAC address in that it uses an OUI assigned by the IEEE. However, WWNs are longer (8 bytes). There are two types of WWNs on a HBA; a node WWN (WWNN), which is shared by all ports on a host bus adapter, and a port WWN (WWPN), which is unique to each port. There are HBA models of different speeds: 1Gbit/s, 2Gbit/s, 4Gbit/s, 8Gbit/s, 16Gbit/s, 10Gbit/s and 20Gbit/s.
The major Fibre Channel HBA manufacturers are QLogic and Emulex. As of mid-2009, these vendors shared approximately 90% of the market. Other manufacturers include Agilent, ATTO, Brocade, and LSI.
HBA is also known to be interpreted as High Bandwidth Adapter in cases of Fibre Channel controllers.
Read more about this topic: Host Adapter
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