George, Douglas: Very interesting article in Performance Computing by Edwin Lee, FC consultant, Chair of the T11.4 standards working group [and former poster to this thread].
performancecomputing.com
Excerpts:
<< Fibre Channel has arrived, and is already a vital part of mission-critical enterprise systems. According to Dr. Edward Frymoyer, an analyst at EMF Associates, about 1.25 million Fibre Channel ports and over $3.5 billion in Fibre Channel-based systems were installed in 1998.>> <<According to Frymoyer, about a half-million ports installed in 1998 are on disk drives.>>
<< But Fibre Channel has the capability to do much more, and the horsepower to eventually challenge Ethernet's dominance of LANs. >>
<<Where does this lead? VI may be a step toward CANs--compute area networks. These networks will enable us to scale processing power the way SANs enable us to scale storage. CANs will require low-latency communications of many relatively short messages, while SANs require wide-bandwidth communications of much larger blocks of data. Fibre Channel is the one communication technology that supports both effectively. In fact, a single fabric can support both requirements concurrently.>>
<<All in all, the cost of ownership savings for a loop versus a switch is questionable today and will favor switches within the next two years. >>
<< We expect hubs to be among the first victims of the declining costs of switches.
At Fall Comdex 1998, Ancor, one of the early producers of Fibre Channel, announced an eight-port switch with a single-piece price of $1,050 per port.[ED: I believe the Ancor price per port was quoted at $1250 at unit one- Neil] The OEM price is considerably lower. We expect one or more other leading switch vendors to announce similarly priced switches within months. $300 per port, 100MB/sec, switches should be readily available by the year 2000. It's simply a matter of volume and planned improvements in CMOS technologies. >> |
