What is Fibre Channel?

Fibre Channel is commonly recognized or you may say known being an excellently used storage networking technology in the computer world and this technology type is also recognized and discussed with its short name i.e. . Primarily or main this network technology which is also recognized being a gigabit-speed technology is being brought into usage in computer world for storage networking data.

T11 Technical Committee actually standardized this technology which is well-known with the name Fibre Channel and this committee works under the jurisdiction of InterNational Committee for Inofrmation Technology Standards which is also widely or you may say commonly recognized in the computer world with the short name or abbreviated name INCITS. This INCITS is actually working for the American National Standards Institute, also known famously with abbreviated or short name ANSI.

Primarily or you may say majorly or mainly usage in the early ages of this Fibre Channel technology was made in the field of computers that are known as Super Computers. But these days, this storage networking technology is commonly used in storage area network (also known commonly with its abbreviated name in computer world i.e. SAN) being the standard connection type especially in the enterprise storage world.

Though the name is Fibre Channel but this technology may also run on copper wire known as twister pair in addition to the main fiber-optic cable. FCP, which is also abbreviated or defined as Fibre Channel Protocol, is actually brought into usage in order to transports commands known as SCSI commands predominantly over the networks of Fibre Channel. This FCP is absolutely similar or work in the same way as TCP works in the popular form of networking known as IP networking.

Fibre Channel is a high-speed robust protocol for managing the transfer of information in storage area networks (SANs). It supports data rates from 1 through 10 Gbps. At 10 Gbps, it leverages much of the technology used by Ethernet, making use of XGMII and XAUI interfaces, for example. Fibre Channel can help with design of large-scale, storage-intensive systems. It can also provide a solution that allows rapid storage and retrieval of information, while simplifying the interconnection of different components in the system. Figure 1 shows the Fibre Channel topography.

 Figure 1. Fibre Channel Topology

Altera® devices can implement 1-, 2-, 4-, 8-, and 10-Gbps versions of Fibre Channel. The cores are highly configurable, allowing you to customize the operation of the core without engaging in a separate engineering customization project. The Altera solutions cover the FC-1 and FC-2 layers of the Fibre Channel stack.

The high-speed Arria® II, Stratix® V (GX and GT), Stratix IV (GX and GT), Stratix II GX, and Stratix GX FPGAs and HardCopy® IV GX ASICs provide the kind of performance that allows implementation of 1- and 2-Gbps Fibre Channel in lower-speed-grade devices, while still supporting leading-edge development of 4-Gbps, 8-Gbps, and 10-Gigabit implementations. These devices are equipped with built-in transceivers that provide a dedicated mode for implementing the XAUI interface that is available for 10-Gigabit Fibre Channel. This allows for more efficient implementation of the entire interface in a single device. Embedded within this transceiver are dedicated rate-matching FIFO buffers, 8B/10B encoding and decoding functions, and word-alignment functions. Each group of four channels also has built-in channel alignment circuitry to minimize skew across the interface. The Stratix V GT and Stratix IV GT devices, with integrated transceivers supporting a 10-Gbps data rate, allow for implementation of the Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol. Stratix V GT devices with an integrated 64B/66B encoder/decoder provide a more efficient implementation of this protocol.