FCIA Announces Fastest Storage Networking Protocol
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is moving ahead on the next generation of its industry standard networking protocol for storage area networks (SANs). Gen 6 Fibre Channel is being touted as the able to provide the industry's fastest storage networking.
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is moving ahead on the next generation of its industry standard networking protocol for storage area networks (SANs). Gen 6 Fibre Channel is being touted as the able to provide the industry’s fastest storage networking.
According to the FCIA, Gen 6 FC enables SANs of up to 128GFC and includes features that even further improve network reliability, energy efficiency and operational simplicity. The latest version of the protocol was designed to address performance, reliability and scalability requirements of hyperscale virtualization, solid state disk (SSD) storage technology and the latest in data center architectures.
However, it’s going to take some time before the new protocol makes it out into the market. The FCIA doesn’t expect solutions to be broadly available until 2016. So start planning ahead, I guess.
“Continued innovation for the Fibre Channel standard is designed to extend its position as the industry’s most reliable and robust storage networking solution, which is used for today’s most mission-critical enterprise applications,” said Skip Jones, FCIA chairman, in a prepared statement. “Enterprises and service providers can look forward to new innovations from the community of compute, network and storage vendors that will develop next-generation solutions in 2016 based on the Gen 6 standard in order to leverage its advanced feature set.”
For partners—and, of course, for end customers—the new standard will double the 16GFC throughput of 3,200Mbps to 6,400Mpbs in 32GFC. Gen 6 FC also has an option to quadruple 32GFC to 128GFC throughput levels, essentially providing up to 25,600Mbps, based on the seamless inter- and backward-compatibility of Fibre Channel technology.
“With the development of Gen 6 Fibre Channel, enterprises should feel confident that their Fibre Channel investments are secure and that continued innovation from the vendor community will further optimize performance, security, reliability and operational simplicity to better optimize both flash and traditional storage infrastructures,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director for Storage Systems and Software at IDC, in a prepared statement.
