Storage Area Networks: Designing and Implementing a Mass Storage System

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3.2 How Does Fibre Channel Help?

Fibre Channel is a new communications protocol designed to overcome the limitations of existing architectures. It is a generic data transport mechanism with the primary task of transporting data at the fastest rate possible using current technology. Fibre Channel is a scalable interface for achieving high-speed data transfer rates among heterogeneous systems and peripherals. System types include supercomputers, mainframes, workstations, and desktop PCs.

Peripherals include mass storage devices such as disk arrays and possibly tape libraries. The main purpose of Fibre Channel is to have any number of existing protocols over a variety of physical media and existing cable options.

Table 3-1 shows the various speeds and distances that can be attained using different cable types.

Table  3-1. Cable Types, Speeds, and Distances

SPEED (Mbps)

9 µm Single Mode

50 µm Multimode

62.5 µm Multimode

COAX

Mini COAX

TWINAX

STP

133

     

100 m

42 m

93 m

80 m

266

10 km

2 km

1 km

100 m

28 m

66 m

57 m

533

10 km

1 km

1km

71 m

19 m

46 m

48 m

1063

10 km

500 m

175 m

50 m

14 m

33 m

28 m

2125

2 km

500 m

         

4250

2 km

175 m

         

3.2.1 Fibre Channel Use for Mass Storage

Since Fibre Channel is a generic data transport mechanism, it can transmit a number of existing networking and I/O protocols:

I/O protocols:

Network protocols:

Hewlett-Packard has chosen to support the SCSI-3 protocol over Fibre Channel for its mass storage environment. Mass storage consists of several device classes:

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