SAN Connectivity: A Healthy High - Fibre Discussion - Editorial

Computer Technology Review,  Oct, 1999  by Mark Brownstein,  Hal Glatzer

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I/O with Mark & Hal

HAL: Mark, what's the latest on the Fibre Channel front? I've been so busy covering the "5" for "storage" angle in SANs that I'm not up to date on the "N" for "network" angle.

MARK: Well, the Fibre Channel side of the equation is consolidating.

HAL: You mean they're bundling optical fibers into thick cables?

MARK: No, Hal. The two major industry groups advocating Fibre--and that's "Fibre" spelled with a capital "F" and an "r-e"--the Fibre organizations are uniting as one. Presumably, this will give them a more unified approach to standards and help them to get their message out.

HAL: Two organizations? A couple of years ago there was only the Fibre Channel Loop Community--the FCLC. What's the other one?

MARK: It was the Fibre Channel Association. They and the FCLC are now one organization called the Fibre Channel Industry Association--the FCIA. I was at their first meeting and they didn't all agree on everything. But they did form working groups. One of the committees is making plans for Comdex, where they'll probably have a demo room, as they did last year. But this time, they'll show greater interoperability across products from multiple vendors.

HAL: "Interoperability!" Can they really do that?

MARK: They said they could. They'll also be demonstrating Fibre-connected SANs with all the component devices linked by Fibre. The message they want to deliver is that Fibre is here, that it works, and that real, working implementations are available.

HAL: I guess that'll impress the tire-kickers at Comdex. But don't you think they're overstating their case somewhat? Fibre isn't really very easy to implement-- at least, not yet. SCSI has its shortcomings, but it's a lot closer to plug-and-play.

MARK: True. Fibre is not plug and play. I don't think you can connect just any fibre storage device to just any fibre fabric network and expect everything to work, at least not right out of the box. There are management issues that have to be worked out.

HAL: And standards. Which I suspect is at the heart of the trade-groups' consolidation. They must have realized that it's no good to have two organizations setting standards independently.

MARK: Right.

HAL: So, what's going to happen until some standards get set? You have all these enterprises that are asking for SANs. I bet each of them is going to get a proprietary "solution."

MARK: Possibly. In some cases, certainly, but at least it's an open process now with a lot of engineering minds hard at work, trying to make it all congeal. The important thing, as Woodrow Wilson put it, is to have "open covenants, openly arrived-at."

HAL: I thought that the industry's timelines were fixed a couple years ago when Fibre Channel knocked IBM's SSA out of the water.

MARK: There have been some generalized timetables and standards; the overall concepts are well understood. Yet as the old cliche goes, "the devil is in the details." In practice, making everything work with everything else, end to end, is still something of a challenge.

HAL: I'll say! Aside from some Fibre backbones for boosting distance, most of the SANs that have been installed so far have SCSI drives. I haven't heard of any SAN that's totally fibre, end-to-end. Where are the Fibre servers? Where are the SANs that have Fibre Channel host bus adapters, connecting through Fibre switches that talk native Fibre to drives with Fibre interfaces?

MARK: It's true that there don't seem to be any implementations like that yet, but I'm sure they're on their way. That's certainly on the FCIA's agenda. Seagate and Quantum now have hard drives with native Fibre interfaces and a lot of other native Fibre devices are being developed. I think we are on the verge of a tremendous growth in true fibre drives because the controller chips and other essential components are available now and they're affordable.

HAL: I think they have a while to go before they threaten SCSI's hegemony. Yet having a single industry organization augurs well for focusing down on the technical issues.

MARK: Sure, it's too early to attribute any new hardware products directly to the new Fibre Channel Industry Association. But the merger was probably a long time coming and future efforts should help to speed the acceptance and adoption of Fibre. A good proportion of the SANs shipped next year will probably be connected by fibre. I suspect that, by 2001 and beyond, the proportion that are "all-Fibre"-- however you define that--will grow even larger.

HAL: However, the FCIA defines "all-Fibre" is more important, I think.

MARK: Speaking of SCSI, what have you been seeing on the storage side, Hal?

HAL: Well, for SANs, the highest-capacity 3.5 inch drive is now Seagate's 50GB Barracuda 50, which has 11 disks inside.

MARK: Wow. It's only been a few months since they introduced their 47GB drive. Yet that's progress, I guess. It's SCSI, right?

HAL: All the big drives are CSI and will continue to be SCSI for a long time. It costs more to manufacture something new, like an all-Fibre drive, and there's relatively little demand compared to the demand for SCSI or IDE drives. So besides SANs--which, after all, not everybody can afford--there's nothing on the horizon that'll help make Fibre drives cost-competitive. The FCIA can set all the standards they want, but SCSI is still the interface to beat. I think we're looking at five years before we really see full market penetration of Fibre drives. Then we can talk about "end-to-end" Fibre.