Hi pigboy,
Yikes, completely forgot about the Fiber channel thing, I've been a bit busy 'round here lately, especially with the holidays.
I forget the exact nature of your original question, but here's my opinion (for what that's worth)...
I drive a lot of the purchasing (and admin) for the NFS servers that my group runs with and therefore stay on top of the technology. From what the NFS mfr's are telling me, most disk drive co's are working on fiber channel based disk drives. This is a Good Thing. With drive RPM's getting faster and faster, feature size shrinking and read/write head technology exploding (IBM is pretty amazing), a big bottleneck in the I/O chain is the physical interface to the disk.
Fiber channel is nice technology for this application, fast speeds, optical transport, etc. This is where I see a direct application of FC flourishing (Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop).
The work done for the FC physical interface was directly leveraged for Gigabit Ethernet, i.e. the optics, but the sped was increased to a true gigabit. FC is nominally 1.062Gb/s on the fiber, GE is 1.25Gb/s on the fiber to handle a 1Gb/s payload (due to 8B/10B encoding).
Does this answer your original query?
Regards,
Lerxst |
