[SunRescue] WTB: FCAL cards (SBus)

[Björn Ramqvist]

Oh, this is a long story. Look at some specs at
http://www.fibrechannel.org

Sun started their "Fiber Channel" interface a couple of years ago,
running fiber at 250 Mb (Megabit). That interface had the wonderful
advantage of fiber - separating storage away from compute resources some
hundred meters away, most used for fire security. It hadn't got any of
todays "Fibre Channel" characteristics, where all the "nodes" on the bus
are built up with unique ID's running a serial high-speed protocol. It's
even capable of running Full Duplex at those speeds (1000 Megabit) which
doubles theoretical performance up to 200 MB/s.
That's not stopping there either. Next-generation Fibre Channel is on
the move with speeds doubling that performance.

At our job, a customer of ours has just begun building a so-called
SAN-network with hubs, switches and all that, all dedicated to
storage-only. Todays FC-networks handles SCSI-over-FC, all the
characteristics of SCSI (plus some logic) but without the copper
restrictions. (Although copper are being used in cheaper installations)
The Fibre-Channel media can also be used to transfer IP, WAN, ATM and
other protocols, with special bridges. (Although I haven't seen one)

And remember all the terms here.
MB = MegaByte
Mb = Megabit (some people say Mbit to avoid confusion)

So in theory, all the "mb" spelling out there would stand for
"millibit"...
It's so much fun seeing even big guys like IBM, HP and others type same
mistakes. :-)

/Bjorn

Matthew Haas wrote:
> 
> Hey,
> 
> Just curious- I know FCAL is Fibre Channel... but what exactly does the
> "AL" part of the acronym stand for?
> 
> For that matter I'm not 100% sure what Fibre Channel is... I always
> thought it was a WAN-based technology that requires a special Fuzzy Logic
> controller, and speeds topped at 200Mb/s... although I'd imagine the
> technology would be much faster now that we have SCSI 160m... but the
> prices of Fibre Channel and SCSI drives (At least once upon a time) seemed
> the same or very similar... makes me think they were SCSI with a faster
> interface.
> 
> Any words of enlightenment greatly appreciated. :)
> 
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