Industry Concepts

Fibre Channel: 

Fibre Channel is a standards-based, gigabit transport that is optimized for storage and other high speed applications. Three topologies based on fibre channel are available: point-to-point, arbitrated loop, and fabric. Arbitrated loop and fabrics provide the underlying infrastructure of most SANs. Arbitrated loop consists of shared bandwidth and round-robin data forwarding. Whereas, switched fabric dedicates full bandwidth on each port and allows simultaneous data transfers to a single node. Fibre Channel supports high speed transport, long distances (to 10 km), and up to millions of devices in extended network configurations. By introducing the scalability and flexibility of networking to the server/storage relationship, Fibre Channel is enabling new storage applications for clustering, disaster recovery, and shared resource requirements.