Janski,
I thought you were a Fibre Channel/Ancor skeptic. <g> Your last few posts (especially the Sequent article) pretty much prove what many of us have been saying about the need for Fibre Channel switched fabrics at the high-end.
These quotes were especially interesting to me:
"Sequent supports switched fabric using 16-port Silkworm digital switches supplied by Brocade Communications Systems (www.brocadecomm.com). The topology distributes Fibre's speed evenly to what in theory could be an unlimited number of devices attached to the host. In the NUMA design, the switched-fabric link also enables the quad processors to communicate over multiple paths, eliminating any processor bottleneck and assuring redundancy and high availability."
"Burlington's three NUMA servers each boast three quads. Each server, in turn, has two of the 16-port Silkworms, which manage data flow among the quads, as well as to Burlington's Sequent RAID array that consists of more than 600 9-gigabyte IBM disk drives."
"The first NUMA took 36 hours to build using the point-to-point Fibre Channel interconnectivity upon which the earlier Sequents relied. The second, using the switched-fabric design, took fewer than four hours, he said."
It still seems to me that Sequent-like applications are well suited for Class 1, and that Ancor's latency and scalability advantages in the MKII will eventually win them some customers.
For those that still doubt the viability of Fibre Channel switched fabrics, the last quote says it all. A 9 times improvement in performance (36 hours, down to 4), almost an order of magnitude. That is impressive.
Craig |
