Utilization of Fibre Channel in mass storage

Fibre Channel (FC) is a technology driven standard, which is mainly used in storage networking and works on a gigabit speed network framework. It has multiple physical interface types and supports large amounts of data transfer. With the Fibre channel, the transport of multiple protocols over a common physical interface can be achieved and it can give a break, from the growing set of physical interfaces, where manufacturers need to choose the wide range of Physical interfaces and that too for limited general use.

FC technology is available in many sizes in the systems and first appeared in workstations and then migrated to mainframe systems. It is found, where the power users of desktop are connected to the networks. In this present digitalized world, one can find a proprietary fiber optics interface on the workstations and desktops. When the users know the speed and functions of the Fibre channel interfaces, then the use of this high speed technology will witness rapid growth. This will be witnessed in data interchange in small groups that have high speed interconnect necessities.

Fibre channel offers benefits such as scalability, efficiency, congestion free data transfer and is possible with high performance levels.

Fibre Channel topologies

In order to describe the number of ports connection, there are three major Fibre channel topologies. In FC technology, an entity which actively connects over a network is called as a port and it need not be a hardware port. The port is the offered on Fibre channel switch, HBA and disk storage as a communication medium.

The three major Fibre channel topologies are:

• Point 2 point- in this FC topology, the two devices are connected directly to each other and is carved as a simplest topology and that too has a limited connectivity.

• Switched fabric- in this FC architecture, the devices or loops of devices are connected to Fibre channel switches and this framework is similar to that, which is deployed in Ethernet connectivity. In this architecture, the switches manage the state of the fabric, which is offered for optimized interconnections. The traffic flow is specifically assigned to the ports and is not transmitted to other ports. In case of a port failure, it is isolated in such a way that, the failure will not affect other ports. The fabric architecture allows multiple pairs of port communication. The traffic flow is specifically designed for the ports and is not transmitted to other ports.

• Arbitrated loop- this Fibre channel technology, is like a token ring networking, where the devices are connected in ring format. This fabric offers a speed of 8GFC of data in between the devices.

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Fibre channel connectivity

The connectivity of devices takes place over Fibre optic cabling, with two unidirectional fiber optic cables. In this two connectivity’s, one is for transferring data and the other is for receiving the data.

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