Fibre Channel: a connection to the future

With commodity microprocessors on the horizon capable of processing hundreds of MIPS, current transmission rates cannot accommodate "Amdahl's Law"-where 1 Mbps of I/O is required for every MIPS of processing power-and will become a bottleneck to system performance in data-intensive applications. To remedy this shortcoming, ANSI Committee X3T11 initiated development of Fibre Channel, a switched protocol capable of transmitting at rates exceeding 1 Gbps, while still supporting existing protocols over both optical fiber and copper cables. Fibre Channel combines the best attributes of legacy channels and networks into a single standard that is a generic transport mechanism for data, voice and video. It is the key to scientific and business applications implemented in open and distributed architectures, because it removes the barriers to performance presented by the old methods of data communications. Fibre Channel introduces the high-performance, easy-to use, low-cost communications required by a new breed of processors and applications. Available today are new high-speed, scalable links to storage; high-performance networks enabling clusters, backbones, imaging, and visualization; and low-cost arbitrated loops providing efficient peripheral I/O.<
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