8GB Fibre Channel Ready to Roll

By Doug Barney

Storage vendors, led by Emulex Corp. of Costa Mesa, CA, and others, are starting to beat the drums for 8GB Fibre Channel, roughly double the speed of today’s fastest fibre channel connections.

Emulex this month announced plans for a line of 8GB gear, including I/O controllers and Host Bus Adapters (HBAs).

Because the new gear, due next year, is backward compatible with 2GB and 4GB Fibre Channel, Emulex argues it is a great way to stitch together existing Storage Area Networks (SANs).

While this makes a lot of sense, faster Fibre may run into the same problems that faster Ethernet, particularly 10GB Ethernet, ran into in its early years when the uptake was slow.

In many cases, faster is better. Faster CPUs, snappier drives, and quicker Internet connections almost always translate into a more satisfied user. But networks are different. While we could always use more speed in the wide area, local connections are often not near the point of saturation.

This is also true for storage networks, as Network World’s Deni Connor points out in this analysis, many 2GB and 4GB Fibre links are far from the breaking point.

The market, however, has an interesting way of making faster technologies standard. Faster forms of Ethernet took hold because the vendors offered adapters with dual speeds, 10/100 and 100/1GB. And ultimately the faster tech is sold at the same price as the older, slower stuff, just as will happen with 8GB Fibre.

http://www.emulex.com/products/hba/8gbs/ds.jsp