Faster Fibre Channel products on tap

Fibre Channel is getting faster but not necessarily more expensive.

That was the word leading up to this week's Storage Networking World in Phoenix, where some of the first 4G bit/sec Fibre Channel products are expected to be introduced.

Early 4G bit/sec Fibre Channel host bus adapters and switches began trickling out last year, but now complementary arrays and controllers are rolling out, too.

The new storage-area network gear is an upgrade from 1G and 2G bit/sec Fibre Channel offerings, though will be backward-compatible, vendors and analysts say. They also say that 4G products initially will be only marginally more expensive than 2G products, and that by year-end the products could be priced about the same. (Also in the works is 8G and 12G bit/sec technology.)

StorageTek this week is expected to announce two 4G bit/sec products: a midrange disk subsystem it sells under an OEM agreement with Engenio, and a 32-port Silkworm 4100 Fibre Channel switch it offers via an OEM agreement with Brocade Communications.

The FlexLine FLX380, which is the industry's first 4G bit/sec array, hosts as many as 224 Fibre Channel or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment drives and starts at $100,000. The Silkworm 4100, which supports both Fibre Channel and Fibre Connection technology for attachment to mainframes, starts at $800 per port, just $50 more per port than its 2G bit/sec counterpart.

Another expected first is Agilent 's 4G bit/sec Fibre Channel controller, a product used in storage arrays to manage device operations and facilitate data transfer between host computers and disk drives.

Fibre Channel Industry Association members will highlight a host of the speedy new Fibre Channel products in an interoperability demonstration.

Users and analysts are split on whether 4G bit/sec technology will be adopted soon.

"Even though users don't need 4G bit Fibre Channel, if it costs the same as 2G bit, why not?" says Stephanie Balouras, senior analyst at The Yankee Group. "As customers update networking components, they'll select 4G bit because it costs the same. Customers aren't going to rip and replace their infrastructure for the sake of 4G bit."

But Mark Lemmons, CTO for video management company Thought Equity in Denver, has done just that. He has migrated from 2G to 4G bit/sec Fibre Channel.

"We move extremely large files around," he says. "As an example, when we do a film transfer we go direct to disk with no compression. The transfers can be multiple terabytes. We have so many large files that I am interested in any technology that helps me grease the wheels of my data center and move the files quicker."

Lemmons uses Qlogic 4G bit/sec Fibre Channel host bus adapters in his servers, McData switches and StorageTek's new FlexLine FLX380.