Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Home on the range where the buffalo roam -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Boplicity who wrote (1781)	5/22/2000 11:06:00 AM
From: r.edwards	Respond to of 13572

FC vs,Ethernet, while fibre channel doesn't differ much from ethernet in terms of the actual bandwidth a connecction using the protocol will allow, the former does have an edge over in the latter in that the maximum size for an individual data packet that can be sent via fibre channel (125 MB) is larger than nearly any individual file you can think of, while the packet size for ethernet (1.5KB) is quite low, given that it's a general-purpose network protocol. To see why this matters, suppose that a client on a corporate LAN attempted to access a 5 MB AVI video clip in a storage box two miles away in terms of cabling. If his company were to use ethernet connections for the SAN, upon coming off of the storage pool and onto the ethernet-based SAN, the data for the video clip would immediately have to be broken up into thousands of packets before reaching the server where the application using the file resides. On the other hand, were a fibrel channel-based SAN to exist in this scenario, the video clip could travel as an unadulterated 5 MB file over those two miles, leading to much less processing to be done by both the server and the storage box. It's easy to see in which of the two scenarios the client is better serviced. This performance advantage related to reduced processing is a factor that will continue to increase in its importance given the rate at which storage demand growth(and thus growth for the network traffic related to it) is outpacing Moore's law. Granted, this benefit is fairly inconsequential if the file being requested happened to be something along the lines of a 20KB Microsoft Word document, but as the previously-mentioned trend of ever-increasing file sizes continues... Enterprise/Internet Storage 101 by Eric Jhonsa, 4/18/00 _________ also, another link, white paper,Fibre channel and ethernet. brocade.com