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Switches, Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. more...
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Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), an American National Standard Institute–accredited standards committee. It started for use primarily in the supercomputer field, but has become the standard connection type for storage area networks in enterprise storage. Despite its name, Fibre Channel signaling can run on both twisted-pair copper wire and fiber optic cables.
Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) is the interface protocol of SCSI on the Fibre Channel.
History
Fibre Channel started in 1988, with ANSI standard approval in 1994, as a way to simplify the HIPPI system then in use for similar roles. HIPPI used a massive 50-pair cable with bulky connectors, and had limited cable lengths. Fibre Channel was primarily interested in simplifying the connections and increasing the lengths, as opposed to increasing speeds. Later it broadened its focus to address SCSI disk storage, providing higher speeds and far greater numbers of connected devices.
It also added support for any number of "upper layer" protocols, including SCSI, ATM, and IP, with SCSI being the predominant usage.
Fibre Channel topologies
There are three major Fibre Channel topologies,
Point-to-Point (FC-P2P). Two devices are connected back to back. This is the simplest topology, with limited connectivity.;
Arbitrated loop (FC-AL). In this design, all devices are in a loop or ring, similar to token ring networking. Adding or removing a device from the loop causes all activity on the loop to be interrupted. The failure of one device causes a break in the ring. Fibre Channel hubs exist to connect multiple devices together and may bypass failed ports. A loop may also be made by cabling each port to the next in a ring. Often an arbitrated loop between two ports will negotiate to become a P2P connection, but this is not required by the standard.;
Switched fabric (FC-SW). All devices or loops of devices are connected to Fibre Channel switches, similar conceptually to modern Ethernet implementations. The switches manage the state of the fabric, providing optimized interconnections. Very limited security is available in today's fibre channel switches.;
Fibre Channel layers
Fibre Channel is a layered protocol. It consists of 5 layers, namely:
FC0 The physical layer, which includes cables, fiber optics, connectors, pinouts etc.;
FC1 The data link layer, which implements the 8b/10b encoding and decoding of signals.;
FC2 The network layer, defined by the FC-PI-2 standard, consists of the core of Fibre Channel, and defines the main protocols.;
FC3 The common services layer, a thin layer that could eventually implement functions like encryption or RAID.;
FC4 The Protocol Mapping layer. Layer in which other protocols, such as SCSI, are encapsulated into an information unit for delivery to FC2.;
Read more at Wikipedia.org
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