| Here are a couple of possibly interesting developments in the
Fibre Channel space. Storage Architecture maintains a web page
containing a journal of essentially all relevant internet discussion
on Fibre Channel topics at: http://catcsm.shr.dec.com/index.html
802.3z continues to think that the FC physical layer is the
right way for them to go, with a speed increase to about 20% more
than Fibre Channel's 1.0625 Gbps in order to get to their 10x
speed goal. Five interconnect variants are under discussion:
- long haul copper (1000 BaseT)
- short haul copper (1000 BaseCX)
- long wave fiber (1000 BaseLX)
- short wave fiber (1000 BaseSX)
- twisted pair (CAT5 UTP)
A ballot is expected to be held this fall for a standard
to be published in March 1998. The current expectation is
that the interface chips for this new version of Ethernet
will have about 1,000,000 transistors on a 4 watt 0.35 micron
chip. A question has been raised about how this was going to
end up being an inexpensive product.
A proposal has been made by the Fibre Channel Association
of Japan (30 member joint industry marketing organization, a
branch of the US organization) for a WAN channel backbone.
This consists of an AAL-5 description that would allow Fibre Channel
traffic on ATM.
Microsoft announced that NT version 5 will have support for
Fibre Channel as a storage interconnect. This will use the
SCSI protocol to talk to disks. No network support.
However, it is becoming clear that the Fibre Channel community
is leaning towards a network-like configuration approach with
recent proposals by various FC switch vendors to use SNMP
as a storage network configuration method. This would allow
a single GUI to cover both the communications network and
the storage network. It would also mean a gradual move towards
support for IP, etc., in a Fibre Channel environment. Up to now
most host adapter vendors have not considered IP support
to be a requirement--this may begin to change...
Doug.
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