Here's more info on FICON. As the co-developer and manufacturer of the FICON bridge card, Mcdata is already reaping the benefits of IBM's furious chase after EMC. FICON sales went from $1 million in the 1H99 to $13.4M in the 2H00. Indications from the only other known vendors of FICON HBAs and ESCON directors -- Emulex and Inrange -- suggest that this major migration market is going to heat up during the next 18 months. If I'm not mistaken, Mcdata has already sold over 1,000 FICON bridge cards to the ESCON installed base located in 6,000+ sites in more than 60 countries. That means 6,000+ ready customers for its FC-based Directors, which according to Mcdata is already being used by about half of the Global 2000.
34 Planning and Implementing an IBM SAN
1.3.3 What about ESCON and FICON?
Sceptics might already be saying that the concept of SAN is not new. Indeed, for System 390 (S/390) users, the implementation of shared storage on a dedicated network has been common since the introduction of Enterprise System Connection (ESCON) in 1991. However, for UNIX, Windows NT and other open systems users, the need for such capability is now extremely high. As we have shown, the traditional SCSI parallel bus architecture, most commonly used in these environments, is no longer capable of handling their growing data intensive application requirements. These users are faced with many of the same problems which challenged mainframe users in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and which largely were solved by ESCON. But the ESCON architecture does not answer the open systems needs of today, due to a number of critical limitations.
ESCON is primarily a S/390 solution, which does not support open systems protocols for data movement, and ESCON is limited in performance (nominally 17 MB/second), relative to
technologies available today. An enhancement to ESCON is provided by Fibre Connection (FICON). Figure 9 shows how FICON enhances ESCON.
Figure 9. FICON enhances ESCON
ESCON
1) Many connections
2) Many channels, ports, cables,patch panel ports, etc.
3) 20MB/sec link rate half duplex
4) Supports > 500 I/O's/sec/channel
5) Intermix of large & small block data on one channel not advised
6) 1K unit addresses/channel
7) 1K unit addresses/CU
8) Performance degradation at 9KM
FICON
1) Fewer connections
2) Fewer channels, ports, cables, patch panel ports, etc.
3) 100MB/sec link rate full duplex
4) Supports > 4000 I/O's/sec/channel
5) Intermix of large & small block data on one channel is feasible
6) 16K unit addresses/channel
7) 4K unit addresses/CU
8) Little performance degradation at 100KM
The S/390 FICON architecture retains ESCON topology and switch management characteristics. FICON channels can deliver data rates up to 100 MB/second full-duplex, and they extend channel distances up to 100 kilometers. More storage controllers and devices can be supported per FICON link, relieving channel constraints in configuring S/390 processors.
The FICON architecture is fully compatible with existing S/390 channel command words (CCWs) and programs. But, most importantly, FICON uses Fibre Channel for transportation of data, and, therefore, in principle, is capable of participating with other platforms (UNIX, Windows NT, Novell
Netware, etc.) in a Fibre Channel enterprise SAN. However, this capability is not yet supported, due to a number of network management requirements imposed by the S/390 architecture.
IBM expects a transition period, during which S/390 FICON SANs will develop separately from Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) open systems SANs, which use the SCSI protocol. In the longer term, FCP and FICON SANs will merge into a true Enterprise SAN.
IBM has published a number of IBM Redbooks on the subject of FICON and an example of this is Introduction to IBM S/390
FICON, SG24-5176 . Additional redbooks that describe FICON can be found at the IBM Redbooks site by using the search argument FICON.
www.redbooks.ibm.com
Chapter 7. Implementing the McDATA ED-5000
Since the early 1990’s, McDATA has provided IBM with fiber switches for the S/390 world, the ESCON directors. They have built up experience in creating the highly available and reliable equipment necessary to meet the demands of the S/390 world. Any SAN component needs to be as reliable and as available as the large systems they are attached to. With the McDATA Enterprise Director ED-5000 (ED-5000) and its Fibre Channel interface, McDATA has moved this proven technology towards the open market. With open systems closing up on S/390 systems, choosing the McDATA switch allows for enterprise class availability and performance that is usually found in mission critical data centers.
In the chapter that follows we will show how to install and manage a McDATA ED-5000. This device is orderable through IBM as the McDATA Enterprise Fibre Channel Director, 2032-001. |
