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Fibre Channel expands from loop to switch apps
By Loring Wirbel
LAS VEGAS -- Though the Fibre Channel standard has not met the LAN-like
application base many proponents were hoping for in the early 1990s, the
flurry of activity at last month's Networld+Interop and this month's
Comdex/Fall indicates that its served market is expanding from its roots
in storage access.
Fibre Channel's arbitrated-loop topology already extends from merchant
semiconductors to systems delivered by system integrators. And the
switching-fabric topology is showing early signs of serving a divided
market, represented by fully optimized switches sold directly by vendors
such as Brocade Communications Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) and McData Inc.
(Broomfield, Colo.), and customizable switches sold to OEMs by
manufacturers like Ancor Communications Inc. (Minnetonka, Minn.).
A sure sign of market maturity is when vertically integrated
manufacturers take heat for selling products at chip, board and system
level simultaneously. At the N+I show last month, Hewlett-Packard Co.
raised eyebrows by announcing it would embed its popular Tachyon and
Tachyon Lite chips in new HP adapter boards. The move caught board
specialists like Jaycor Networks Inc. (San Diego) unawares. But Skip
Jones, director of planning and technology at QLogic Inc. (Costa Mesa,
Calif.), was not surprised. "HP's primary expertise was never in the
chip business," he said.
Emulex Corp.'s Network Systems group supplies Fibre Channel controllers
mainly to small businesses requiring hubs in a sub-$1,000 configuration.
Since the maturity of arbitrated loop justifies high-volume standard
configurations, the bulk of Emulex's business is in PCI bus
architectures and mainstream operating systems such as Windows NT and
SCO Unix, said Mike Kane, director of Fibre Channel marketing.
Jaycor, for its part, is making host adapters for both PCI and S-Bus,
particularly to leverage the installed base of Sparc workstations in the
field. But vice president of marketing Charles Bazaar said that Sun's
turn to PCI-based UltraSparcs will serve to shift adapter sales heavily
to PCI.
The Fibre Channel business model was simpler when applications were
limited to arbitrated-loop topologies in servers. As switching fabrics
appear, companies need to define more precisely how a switched
infrastructure can be used in server/storage architectures without
adding the complexity of a LAN-like switching mesh. The field is
attracting newcomers like Gadzoox Inc., though Ancor and Brocade were
the two largest vendors at N+I.
Ancor's approach is to keep hardware as generic as possible and let
customers define the protocol. The 16-port GigWorks MKII, introduced at
N+I, aims directly at OEMs and system integrators. It is configured in
versions without any physical-layer connectors, or with optical or fiber
links preinstalled.
Ancor will be among the first to use an E-port concept for multistaging
multiple switch boxes, allowing fabrics to grow to 64 ports. Ancor
already has partnered with Emulex to show how a central switch can link
to a Fibre Channel shared hub, connecting a loop of disks to a switching
fabric.
Startup Brocade, meanwhile, assumes that many OEMs and corporate users
alike need more hand-holding than a generic protocol switch offers.
Brenda Christensen, vice president of marketing, said many customers are
in the early stages of upgrading client/server networks for
high-bandwidth performance. Christensen rejects the common description
of fabrics as a "storage-area network," saying that Brocade is aiming at
complex server/storage networked topologies where data transfer, not
mere access to storage, is the goal.
The company will handle mixes of unicast, multicast and broadcast
traffic, and expects many sites to utilize Internet Protocol over Fibre
Channel. The management software for the Brocade SilkWorm switch allows
initialization of the fabric through typing the IP address.
Brocade has already been through five generations of Fibre Channel
switch and controller ASICs, and is partnering with LSI Logic Corp.
(Milpitas, Calif.), which will have rights to sell a merchant version of
a design developed in part with Brocade.
Brocade will come to Comdex with a partners program to promote switch
and fabric interoperability, as well as an agreement with Digital
Equipment Corp. Digital will integrate SilkWorm with its StorageWorks
server-cluster architecture. Initial Brocade partners include Ciprico,
Crossroads Systems, Emulex, Interphase and Jaycor. |
