Fibre Channel Hard Drive Info

Fibre channel hard drive is a technology for transmitting data between computer devices at high speeds, such as at a data rate of up to one Gbps (one billion bits per second). An eventual data rate of 4 Gbps is proposed (four billion bits per second). Fibre channel is especially suited for connecting computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting a variety of storage controllers and drives.

Since it is three times as fast, fibre channel is expected to replace the Small System Computer Interface (SCSI). It is also more flexible; devices can be as far as 10 kilometers apart. Fibre channel offers a high performance solution, as it has the ability to transfer large volumes of data between numerous interfaces very quickly.

FC-SAN: A Data Protection Solution

A Storage Area Network (SAN) can be deployed in two ways: using Fibre Channel or the IP way. The first is called FC-SAN. Much of the communication is done between the application I/O and the file system.

The file-system and the volume manager in such cases, are on the server, while the storage is assigned to disks. Traditionally, FC-SAN has been considered to be difficult to deploy. FC-SANs are coming up with management tools which make deployment easier, and the task of Fibre Channel storage much more user-friendly.