|
FCIA Announces Milestone towards Completing New 16Gb/s Fibre Channel Standard
Date: Friday 23 October 2009
Author: PHILIP ALSOP
 ANSI INCITS T11 Committee Completes Work on 16GFC.
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) says that the ANSI INCITS T11 Committee completed the technical work on the FC-PI-5 for 16Gb/s Fibre Channel ("16GFC") and voted in early October to send the document out for letter ballot. This milestone marks the technical stability and completeness necessary for vendors to commit to silicon their upcoming designs based upon the FC-PI-5 standard.
With 16GFC, users will experience twice the bandwidth of 8GFC — doubling savings in price/performance, power and port density. Transparently, without user intervention, 16GFC is auto-negotiated backward compatibly to 8GFC and 4GFC, ensuring that the user need not make a forklift remove and replace of their 4GFC or 8GFC Fibre Channel SAN to integrate individual 16GFC products at the pace of their own choosing. 16GFC provides a natural value migration from 8GFC and ensures the end user full confidence that 8GFC purchases made today are preserved investments for tomorrow.
"The timely completion of this standard demonstrates continued industry commitment towards the FCIA Fibre Channel roadmap," says Skip Jones, FCIA Chairman. "Given expected product roll-outs in the 2011 timeframe, 16GFC promises to provide data centre managers with higher speeds and cost savings double that of today's 8GFC and near double of today's 10G Ethernet."
16GFC will propel enterprise-class technologies such as high-density virtualisation by doubling the number of ports that can be virtualised on a single physical FC port and thereby utilise the improved efficiencies that will come with the higher density multi-processor cores, improved single root hypervisors, high-speed storage such as solid state disk drives, and new generation server busses such as 3rd generation PCIe.
Examples of user benefits of this future technology include:
· Improved price/performance
· Lower power
· Backward compatibility
· Flexible configurability
Additional information on the standardisation efforts of 16GFC is available at the ANSI T11 website: www.t11.org.
Click here to return to Storage Networking Solutions Europe (SNS Europe) Newsletter
|
