Fibre Channel Community Tests SAN Compatibility Suite; Industry Group Drives Multivendor Compatibility via Publicly Available Test Suite - Product Information

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, August 9, 1999

The Fibre Channel Community, an international non-profit organization of over 100 leading Fibre Channel companies, Monday announced the successful completion of its most recent round of Fibre Channel interoperability testing which was conducted the week of July 19th in Dallas.

This testing was the latest in a series of "plugfests" and event-driven interoperability demonstrations conducted by the Fibre Channel Community, and the first utilizing the SAN Compatibility Suite test.

The SAN Compatibility Suite is a sequence of tests intended to validate industry standard, link layer operation of Fibre Channel equipment to enable easier integration of large Fibre Channel networks. At the recent interoperability event, the SAN Compatibility Suite was given its initial field-trial by pre-qualifying additions to the large network test configuration utilized during the testing.

"Our goal with the SAN Compatibility Suite is to create a simple set of tests which easily allows both developers and enterprise users to determine the likelihood their Fibre Channel equipment will be compatible on a disparate Fibre Channel SAN," said Mike Fitzpatrick, Chairman of the Fibre Channel Community. "SAN Compatibility Suite accomplishes this by providing a consistent test suite from a single source which can be self-administered."

The SAN Compatibility Suite was developed by the University of New Hampshire's Interoperability Lab in conjunction with the Fibre Channel Community's SAN Working Committee and utilizes the knowledge base of observations captured over more than two years of interoperability testing. The SAN Compatibility Suite will be available for download in the near future from the Fibre Channel Community's web site at www.fccommunity.org and from the University of New Hampshire's Interoperability Lab web site at www.iol.unh.edu.

"The SAN Compatibility Suite takes very detailed expected behaviors and demystifies them into a series of simple pass/fail tests," said Barry Reinhold, the director of the Interoperability Lab at the University of New Hampshire. "Equipment that passes the SAN Compatibility Suite of tests should behave well in a Fibre Channel topology with a reasonable degree of assurance."

In addition to field-testing the SAN Compatibility Suite, the interoperability event tested equipment in small loop, large loop and Fibre Channel fabric configurations. Organizations involved in the most recent testing included Ancor Communications; Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.; Compaq Computer Corporation; Computer Network Technology; Crossroads Systems, Inc.; Eurologic Systems, Inc.; Finisar; Fujitsu Computer Products of America; Gadzoox Networks, Inc.; Hewlett-Packard Company; Hitachi America, Ltd.; IBM Corporation; Interphase Corporation; I-Tech Corporation; LSI Logic; nSTOR Corporation; QLogic Corporation; Quantum Corporation; Seagate Technology, Inc.; Solution Technology; Spectra Logic; StorageTek; Sun Microsystems; Vitesse Semiconductor; Vixel Corporation; Western Digital Corporation; and Xyratex.

Fibre Channel is an NCITS-standard serial connectivity technology designed for data intensive storage applications such as data warehousing, data mining, on-line transaction processing (OLTP), and video/broadcast implementations. Fibre Channel operates over copper and fiber cabling at distances of up to 10 Kilometers and provides point-to-point, arbitrated loop and switched fabric topologies. Currently operating at speeds up to 1Gbps, Fibre Channel handles multiple protocols, including both IP and SCSI, allowing it to merge high-speed I/O and networking functionality in a single connectivity technology.

The Fibre Channel Community is an international non-profit organization with membership that currently includes over 100 major companies representing a wide cross section of the industry embracing manufacturers of servers, disk drives, tape drives, RAID storage modules, switches, hubs, adapter cards, test equipment, cables and connectors, and software solutions. The group's charter is to speed the development and deployment of products and services utilizing Fibre Channel technology by the promotion of industry cooperation and market awareness.

The member companies of the Fibre Channel Community and the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) have voted to merge the two organizations. The resulting organization is expected to be created by the end of August 1999 and will be known as the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). Further information about the Fibre Channel Community can be found at www.fccommunity.org. Additional information on the Fibre Channel Association can be found at www.fibrechannel.com.