InformationWeek

January 5, 1998

High On Fibre

Users and vendors see Fibre Channel as a storage alternative to SCSI

n the storage market, the buzz this year will be Fibre Channel technology. "Fibre Channel is just starting to be deployed and it's all been hype until now," says Mike Casey, director of research for Gartner Group Inc.

Fibre Channel is a drive, a hub, a switch, and a host-computer-to-storage subsystem interconnect. This year, it's expected to move data at a rate of 100 Mbps. But the most compelling function of Fibre storage is the extended distance it allows between computer and storage, or between data centers. By year's end, Fibre will support distances of 10 kilometers.

Thomas Bros-nan, director of Cincinnati Bell Information Systems' data center in Orlando, Fla., plans to translate those benefits into better customer service. Brosnan, who manages a mix of servers and storage from EMC, IBM, StorageTek, and Sun Microsystems, is accustomed to upgrading a mainframe by moving an entire workload from one system to another in 20 minutes. Because many Cincinnati Bell customers are in the exploding market for personal communications services, he's got to have that kind of performance with his client-server systems, too. "Fibre Channel in 1998 will reduce the amount of time we take away from clients for system fixes and updates, so their business goes on without skipping a beat," he says.

Vendors are looking to Fibre Channel at the expense of the primary storage alternative, SCSI. "People will start to use these universal databases incorporating sound and video, and realize how much data they must move," says Robin Harris, director of storage marketing for Sun Microsystems. "They' ll find out how tired SCSI is."

Hewlett-Packard is another of Fibre's early proponents. "We've already shipped Fibre Channel technology to the people who need performance, high availability, and capacity with enterprise servers-and that will include NT in 1998," says Liz Montgomery, HP's storage-product marketing manager. "The transition from SCSI will become pervasive, so that 40% of our server customers could implement Fibre Channel solutions by the end of 1998."

This year will see the beginning of a storage area network (SAN) based on Fibre Channel switches from vendors such as Brocade, G2, and McData. Once integration of switches and subsystems is achieved, the road to pools of data working with pools of storage across unlimited distances will be open. "In the second half of the year, we'll get more involved with SAN and Fibre switches," says Anders Lofgren, a senior analyst at Giga Information Group.

While standards are evolving, cutting-edge customers are going ahead with the infrastructure. "W e see Fibre Channel as an intricate part of our future," says Mark Murawski, manager of architecture and technology for Alliant FoodService Inc. in Deerfield, Ill. "I see it happening in phased approaches over the next two years."

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