A sampling of views from the Fall issue (No. 1) of FibreChannel Focus USA.
A View from the US
Ed Frymoyer
President, emf Associates, Inc.
.....At recent shows - N+1 Las Vegas and Storage Networking World (SNW) Palm Desert - Fibre Channel and SAN were extemely prominent. A few years ago N+1 had an occasional sotrage vendor. Now networked storage is a prinicipal theme, especially with the needs of the Internet Service Providers and large companies for storage consolidation. One of the highlights of SNW was an HDS presentation of a data access system using accelerated SCSI and VI that lowered processor usage from 65% to 3%. End users quickly note this kind of economic leverage.
CISCO continued its marketing FUD attach on the storage market to cover for their missing of the trend. They announced the Open Storage Network (OSN) program. This requires development of SCSI over IP that will take at least several years and by the way a second fiber optic network because the new IP for storage is not compatible with the existing LAN Ethernet equipment. Now let's see mister end user -- forget about your clear and present problem with information management, just wait for our proprietary solution in a few years and prepare to invest in another physical infrastructure. Why anyone believes this transparent approach is a mystery to me. CISCO did lue Andrea Westernein from her post of technical director of SNIA which seriously impacts the SNIA technical programs.
From Continental Europe
Herman Strass
Ethernet Everywhere?
Everybody (well amost) knows how to drive a car. So why are we using railways, buses, pick-ups or even tractors for different kinds of transportation needs? Yes, because different needs cannot be served by just one universal means of transportation. Ethernet does not cure cancer either.
If Ethernet were as good and universal as is claimed by some of its disciples then Fibre Channel (FC) simply would not even exist. It came more than ten years later, it was all new and it had to make its way in full view of established technology. FC was developed for a different set of requirements than Ethernet. Today just about every Storage Area Network (SAN) is made from Fibre Channel technology products. There are many good reasons why FC is a good technology for the applications it is being used for.
Ethernet still serves its traditional applications well. But both applications are not of the same type. Some people think Ethernet speed will do it eventually. But this will not help either. At one gigabit/s speeds the chips used for Gigabit Ethernet (GBE) are derivatives of chips which had been used for FC applications. Ethernet in shared mode provides about 30-40% usage of the raw speed and switched Ethernet maybe doubles this. With the same raw speed FC installation go up to over 95% usage without any big effort. This relation will not change at other speeds like 10 gigabits/s. It just shows that FC is good at big chunks of streaming data (the TV studios and stations were first to take advantage of this), even over large distances and Ethernet is good at chaotic, small-packet, short-range traffic.........
Fibre Channel: Replacment for MIL-STD-1553 and Next Generation Military Data Bus
Wilf Sullivan
DY 4 Systems Inc.
Fast or Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet is seeing adoption in the networking industry; however, due to its point to point topology it complicates vehicle connections as well as maintenance. Additionally, the inherent non-deterministic, collision-rich nature of Ethernet makes it unreliable for the type of real-time, guaranteed, deterministic communication required in avionics and vetronics applications.....
Fibre Channel
Fibre Channel is gaining market share in the commercial world.... ...It is also gaining popularity within the military and has been adopted in avionics upgrades including AWACS Extend Sentry, B-1 Lancer strategic bomber, and F/A-18 Hornet fighter bomber. On the Navy F-18 tactical area moving map capability (TAMMAC) the interconnect between the program load device (PLD) and the map generator will be Fibre Channel. On the B1-B mission computer upgrade, Fibre Channel will be used to interconnect the mission computers and mass storage units while on the AWACS, Fibre Channel is being used to interconnect some 15-20 workstations to the main radar distribution system. Additionally, it is being evaluated to provide high speed interconnects between complex sub-systems on the US/UK net generation tactical Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).
fibrechannel.org
While it's easy to write off all these views as the enlightened self-interest of different players in the Fibre Channel industry, one must not forget the way that 3COM tried to be a player in storage networking only to hightail it out of the industry about 6 months later.
What is beyond dispute that it is the RAID vendor which is typically entrusted by the customer with managing the latency of hundreds of electro-mechanical disk drives.It is the RAID vendor which is typically entrusted by thecustomer with managing the failure of those disk drives. It is the RAID vendor which is typically entrusted by the customer with ensuring high availability and continuous access to the information stored on those storage systems. Those responsibilities will not change in a second-generation FC-based SAN environment where the RAID vendor now has to manage latency and failure of hundreds and thousands of disk drives organized by intelligent controllers and switches, and distributed over the wider area made possible by FC. The only area which network equipment providers like Cisco and 3COM can influence is the deterministic or non-deterministic LAN/WAN/MAN network environment they can provide because those are the crucial parameters that a RAID vendor needs to synchronize the technology with the business requirements of the customer regarding its information lifeblood. No amount of hype, no magical ethernet silicon chip, no magical software stack can possibly survive the kind of interoperability testing that these customers will require. That is why an inherently deterministic core sub-network based on Fibre Channel will continue to thrive alongside an inherently non-deterministic LAN based on Ethernet and IP for the forseeable future.
When the technology is ready (probably in about 5 years), IP over optical networking holds the promise of dynamic provisioning with billing software wrapped around each wavelength. That will have the practical benefit of a cost-effective way of providing exactly the bandwidth each device on a network needs at exactly the right time. Contrast that with the current ethernet network where a device can only utilize all the available wire speed of a network.......at the expense of all other devices. By itself, that is simply not good enough when IT budgets are growing linearly and storage requirements are growing exponentially. |
