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
Famous quotes containing the words fibre and/or channel:
“The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. There was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)