Fibre Channel

By Author: Ted Starsky
Total Articles: 11
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Fibre channel is a technology used to connect storage devices and transmit data between them. It is broadly used in network storage. In storage area network (SAN), one of the solutions for storage networking, fibre channel was the first technology applied. SANs are also made with iSCSI protocol, but compared with iSCSI, fibre channel is said to be faster.

Nowadays, storage networks such as SAN using fibre channel or iSCSI or NAS (network attached storage) Ethernet and TCP/IP protocol are very common storage solutions. The network allows for access to data and its retrieval in case of system or any device failure. There are many ways to provide security of such storage systems using fibre channel technology. Fibre channel allows for quick communication between devices which are the elements of the same network.

Fibre channel is optionally made of optical fiber cables or copper wires. The latter are applied when the distance between devices is not too large. The advantage of optical fiber is flexibility and ability to transmit information over greater distance.

The structure of fibre channel network can be ...
... designed in three ways. “Point to point” connections include direct links between devices, ‘arbitrated loop’ is a set of devices connected with one another into a loop and switched fabric, which uses additional switches between devices to ensure highest reliability of the whole network system.

Fibre channel is not only used for connections between physical devices, such as disk arrays or tape libraries with servers and to transmit data between these units. It is also used in virtualized environments. For example, a virtual storage area network is a type of network topology combining ports of the set of fibre channel switches. The technology of fibre channel is developing quickly in the direction which will allow data sharing over a geographically distributed enterprise. There is an approach to storage data transmission via fibre channel over IP networks, called FCIP. Fibre channel is therefore among the key technologies expected to trigger a rapid development of the storage area network market by increasing the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission.