Dell Powervault Technology

Fibre Channel Technology

Network servers require the capacity to handle large amounts of I/O traffic. I/O traffic to the hard drives has the potential to become the single largest bottleneck of the system and tax the system performance, causing delays in processing on information. Dell PowerEdge servers have been designed around the SCSI standard for years because SCSI has generally delivered a much higher overall throughput and more efficient handling of multiple client requests for data. The SCSI controllers integrated into PowerEdge servers are excellent for handling many functions such as controlling CD-ROM and tape backup drives as well as controlling hard drives for file and print sharing. But, as environments become more complex with business applications or database-driven applications, fibre channel technology can provide better I/O processing efficiency, potentially higher overall performance and better scalability. Fibre channel I an industry standard interconnect and high performance serial I/O protocol that can deliver a new level of reliability, throughput, and distance flexibility for the server industry. Fibre Channel matures proven technology that is media independent and can provide a safe solution for environments that require high availability. It can run over either copper or fiber optic cable. Fibre channel devices typically communicate either through point-to-point connections, loops, or fabrics. Dell will incorporate the loop architecture, called Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL). Unlike the point-to-point FC and SCSI parallel bus architecture, the FC-AL architecture allows information to be passed through one device to another. The FC-AL can have any combination of hosts and drives up to a maximum of 126 devices.

The last ten years have witnessed a ten thousand-fold increase in computer performance. At the same time, requirements are increasing for more robust, highly available, disaster-tolerant computing resources. Nevertheless, computing resources continue to be pushed to their limits, with performance problems often traceable to I/O subsystems that are struggling to keep pace.

I agree the Fibre Channel is an industry standard, high-speed serial data transfer interface that can be used to connect systems and storage in point-to-point or switched topologies. Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL), developed with storage connectivity in mind, is a recent enhancement to the standard, or nodes. FC-AL loops are hoot-pluggable and tolerant of failures.

Fibre Channel, a highly reliable, gigabit interconnect technology allows concurrent communications among workstations, mainframes, servers, data storage systems, and other peripherals using SCSI and IP protocols. It provides interconnect systems for multiple topologies that can scale to a total systems bandwidth on the order of a terabit per second. Fibre Channel delivers a new level of reliability and throughput. FC-AL is the highest performance storage interconnects on the market today, because of its superior performance and networking capabilities, and its broad industry support. Fibre Channel is the interconnect of choice for users that need high reliability, hot pluggability, improved connectivity, and the ability to send large volumes of data quickly over long distances.