One of my first posts on this blog was titled Enterprise Storage: What's Your Poison? and reviewed newly introduced 8Gbit/s Fibre Channel (FC) storage networking products as an alternative to iSCSI. Well, I thought I would rehash this a bit as QLogic Corp. (NasdaqGS:QLGC) has just announced 8Gb Fibre Channel (8GFC), 10Gb Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and 20Gb InfiniBand products.
I find it a little confusing with all of these choices, so let's have a little review of of these products as it relates to storage networking:
- 8GFC is simply a graduation from previous versions of FC as shown below:
| Product Naming
| Throughput (MBps)
| Market Availability (Year)
|
| 1GFC
| 200
| 1997
|
| 2GFC
| 400
| 2001
|
| 4GFC
| 800
| 2005
|
| 8GFC
| 1,600
| 2008
|
| 16GFC
| 3200
| 2011
|
| 32GFC
| 6400
| Market Demand
|
| 64GFC
| 12800
| Market Demand
|
| 128GFC
| 25600
| Market Demand
|
- FCoE is a means of transmitting Fibre Channel commands natively over Ethernet by using an optional transport mechanism instead of TCP/IP, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing Fibre Channel endpoint infrastructure. This would allow Fibre Channel to leverage the Technology of 10 Gigabit Ethernet while preserving the main parts of the Fibre Channel protocol.
- InfiniBand is a pervasive, low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnect which requires low processing overhead and is ideal to carry multiple traffic types (clustering, communications, storage, management) over a single connection.
Almost all of my storage networking experience has focused on traditional FC with a little exposure to iSCSI. Which of these technologies have you employed in your storage network?
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