HP extends Fibre Channel
By Karen J. Bannan, PC Week Online
12.22.97 10:00 am ET
Extending the reach of Fibre Channel technology, Hewlett-Packard Co. next month plans to ship a storage hub that enables corporations to mirror their network data at remote sites as far as 3 km away.
HP's Fibre Channel Long-wave Hub,which supports throughput rates of up to 200MB per second in full-duplex mode, is one of the first hubs to extend server-to-storage Fibre Channel connectivity beyond 2 km, officials at the Palo Alto, Calif., company said. The hub, which will work with the company's Disk Array Model 30/FC storage array and its HP 9000 Enterprise Servers, is based on a modified version of Gadzoox Microsystems Inc.'s Gibraltar CM Gigabit Fibre Channel hub. HP replaced one of the Gibraltar hub's ports with its own Long-wave optical module to extend the distance limit. The company is one of the first to incorporate the more costly long-wave, as opposed to short-wave, optics. "We're in a campus environment, and this hub has some definite possibilities," said John O'Brien, IS manager for Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in New Orleans. "If you have a large installation, [the longer distance] enables you to have less hubs and routers, and less people to support them."
Although the hub will initially work just with HP's Enterprise 9000
family, the company's entire Fibre Channel line will be compatible with all HP servers by the end of January, including the Windows NT-based NetServer line.
However, interoperability issues will relegate the Long-wave Hub to HP
products only. That's a potentially problematic trend among Fibre
Channel vendors.
"There are some serious compatibility issues [with Fibre Channel]," said John Webster, director of IT consulting at The Yankee Group Inc., in Boston. "Not all [Fibre Channel] products work with every box, but the impression that vendors give is, 'Yeah, you can hook up the box and go.'"
A comparable and competing technology to Fibre Channel from IBM,
called Serial Server Architecture, is an open environment that provides connectivity between locations as far as 2.5 kilometers apart. The technology works with servers from Compaq Computer Corp. and HP.
HP's Long-wave Hub is the latest of a string of moves by the company
to make major inroads in the storage market. Other recent efforts
include an agreement to sell Storage Technology Corp.'s line of
TimberWolf tape libraries; a partnership with IBM and Seagate
Software Inc. to develop a new tape standard; and several of its own
Fibre Channel product initiatives, including the SCSI-to-Fibre
Channel-to-SCSI Multiplexer, which helps customers make the
transition from SCSI connections to Fibre Channel.
HP currently garners more than 80 percent of the Fibre Channel chip
market with its Tachyon family. NEC Corp., EMC Corp., Compaq and
Symbios Logic Inc. are among the companies that license the HP chip.
Pricing for HP's Fibre Channel Long-wave Hub is expected to be about
$29,500, officials said. |
