Well, here is some newer news- not much.
Oh My! HP can stretch Fiberchannel to 10km. I wonder what to do if my campus has some branches MORE than 10km away? Hmmm...
<HP claims Fibre Channel
distance improvement
By James Niccolai
IDG News Service, 8/11/98
Hewlett-Packard Co. made two product
announcements yesterday which it says will
provide greater flexibility for customers
building storage area networks (SANs) made
up of multiple servers located at distributed
sites.
A SAN is a specialized type of network in
which data moves quickly and reliably between
servers and other storage resources. Including
multiple servers that contain the same or
similar data in a network allows a business to
take advantage of disaster-recovery and
high-availability capabilities which help keep
the network running in the event that a server
crashes.
HP said the hubs it makes to connect servers in
Fibre Channel-based SANs can now be spaced
up to 10 kilometers (about 6.2 miles) apart,
allowing customers to link servers situated on
either side of a campus, or even spanning a
metropolitan area.
To make it easier to monitor the health of those
expanded networks, HP also announced HP
Fibre Channel Manager, a Web-based network
management software that allows companies to
remotely keep tabs on the status of hubs in a
Fibre Channel network.
Fibre Channel is a 1G-bit/sec network interface
technology used to link multiple servers
together in a SAN.
Previously, HP's long-wave Fibre Channel
hubs could be spaced only three kilometers
apart, effectively limiting customers to
connecting servers in adjacent buildings, said
Phil Kemp, product marketing manager for
Fibre Channel with HP's Enterprise Strategic
Solutions group.
The 10 kilometer networking capabilities are
available immediately to HP's existing Fibre
Channel customers whose cabling plants meet
certain minimum specifications documented on
HP's Web site, Kemp said.
Ten kilometers is the maximum distance
supported by the current Fibre Channel
specification -- an open standard as defined by
the American National Standards Institute --
and no immediate plans are underway to revise
that specification, Kemp said.
Fibre Channel Manager's capabilities include
proactive environmental monitoring of the
Fibre Channel hub's infrastructure elements,
including the fan, power supply and
temperature gauge; detecting which hub ports
are in use, and bypassing or enabling hub ports
from the management workstation, HP said.
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