WHAT IS FIBER CHANNEL AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

Fiber Channel, or FC, is a high-speed network technology (typically running at 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 128 gigabits per second) that is primarily used to connect computer data storage to servers. Fiber Channel (FC) is the predominant technology standard in the field of

Storage Area Network (SAN) data center environment. Fiber Channel was developed as a serial interface to overcome the limitations of the SCSI and HIPPI interfaces. FC solved many of the problems in the data center. These problems included distance, performance, bandwidth, and overhead problems. The way FC is implemented and its inherent functionality are designed to prevent data loss and network congestion while providing a highly available and high performing network. FC was developed using the latest multimodal fiber technologies that have overcome the speed limits of the ESCON protocol.

The throughput variants are summarized below, whereby the increase in capacity is observed from year to year: how does fiber work

Line coding

Net throughput

per direction;

MB / s

Availability

1GFC

8b10b

103.2

1997

2GFC

8b10b

206.5

2001

4GFC

8b10b

412.9

2004

8GFC

8b10b

825.8

2005

10GFC

64b66b

1,239

2008

16GFC "Gen 5"

64b66b

1.652

2011

32GFC "Gen 6"

64b66b

3.303

2016

128GFC "Gen 6"

64b66b

13.210

2016

The physical layer of the Fiber Channel.

The physical layer is based on serial connections using appropriate modules. The Small Form-Factor Pluggable Transceiver (SFP) module and its expanded version, SFP +, are common form factors for ports that support a variety of distances over multimode and single-mode fiber, as shown in the following table. The SFP module uses duplex fiber optic cabling with LC connectors, which is not mentioned in the SFP + standard, but can be used at this speed. Besides the data rate, the big difference between 8G Fiber Channel and 16G Fiber Channel is the coding method. The 64b / 66b encoding used for 16G is a more efficient encoding mechanism than the 8b / 10b encoding for 8G and allows the data rate to be doubled without doubling the line rate.

The latest version of the protocol is based on Gigabit Ethernet, which results in Fiber Channel over Ethernet, or FCoE. It is very simple that the Ethernet provides the physical interface and FC the transport protocol, so that we get an FC frame in an Ethernet frame. Computers can be connected to FCoE with converged network adapters (CNAs) that contain both Fiber Channel host bus adapters (HBA) and Ethernet network interface controllers (NIC) on the same physical card.

BlueOptics © SFP and SFP + product offerings for FCoE compatibility cover various lambdas, distances and data rates and are therefore suitable for 1G FC to 16G Fc.

The Quad Small Form Factor Pluggable (QSFP) module was used for 4-lane implementations of 128GFC. The QSFP uses either the LC connector for 128GFC-CWDM4 or an MPO connector for 128GFC-SW4 or 128GFC-PSM4. MPO cabling uses 8 or 12 fiber cabling infrastructure that connects to another 128 GFC port or can be split into four duplex LC links to 32 GFC SFP + ports. Fiber Channel switches use either SFP or QSFP modules.