FIBRE CHANNEL IS DEAD LONG LIVE FIBRE CHANNEL!

FIBRE CHANNEL first appeared in 1997 as a 1Gb technology and is now currently in its fifth generation at 16Gb. In 2014, the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced the 32Gb Gen 6 standard. This means Fibre Channel has been in the market for 17 years now, and continues to double its speed with each new iteration. But, as detailed in the Gen 6 announcement, it’s not just about the speed. The Fibre Channel standard continues to drive incremental value in the form of services that improve network reliability, energy efficiency, and operational simplicity.

Fibre Channel sales are acknowledged to be declining, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are more than 18 million Fibre Channel ports already installed, delivering storage networking connectivity for the world’s largest enterprises. This installed base inherently means Fibre Channel will continue to remain relevant in the market as a reliable storage protocol. Fibre Channel is being used in cutting edge areas including blazing fast solid state disk (SSD) storage, modern databases, and dense virtual infrastructures.

Fibre Channel – The King of SSD Storage
High performance environments are increasingly using flash storage to increase I/O operations per second (IOPS) and decrease latency. SSDs no longer need spin-up time to respond to I/O requests. The speed of a flash array at 1 million IOPS moves the performance bottleneck from the storage to the network and server I/O infrastructure as illustrated in the below graphic. The network fabric needs to be able to support the faster flow of data while ensuring information flow reliability is not compromised. Without network support, the costly investment into flash arrays and the compute layer is wasted.

Fibre Channel is the obvious choice for high performance arrays to expand and hit full performance at both the storage and compute layers. Recent Fibre Channel innovations enhance this connection by adding Quality of Service (QoS) for flash optimisation. Both flash cache and Logical Unit Number (LUN) prioritisation allows administrators to tailor the data centre environment to fully optimise investment in flash technology. Companies not only meet high resource demands with the touch of a button but also increase performance on critical applications.

Royal Chairs Are Rarely “Throne” Out
Traditional databases such as OLTP/OLAP are still increasing their performance speed/IOPS capability while continually demanding absolutely error-free performance. Both of these databases perform optimally in lossless environments. The first time should be the only time a packet is sent to avoid errors and maintain performance, especially in financial applications. Fibre Channel can promise total protection against silent data corruption. This type of corruption can happen in an environment when incomplete or incorrect data overwrites data on the Storage Area Network (SAN). This can lead to costly downtime and even data loss.

Fibre Channel guarantees protection against this by using the T10 Protection Information protocol (T10 PI). The T10 PI feature ensures end-to-end data integrity in I/O operations by exchanging verification information through each level, ensuring validity of data.

This increase in performance capability of modern databases, combined with the use of high performance flash storage requires a high performance network to match the high speed environment and maintain an increase in end-to-end performance over time. Infrastructure designers will not be quick to dismiss a lossless protocol that has years of experience in reliability of high performance connectivity.
Virtually ruling the kingdom
Virtualisation of desktops and servers has changed from one host and one virtual machine (VM) occasionally querying I/O, to a single host with many VMs generating data requests to a SAN. Each VM with different I/O requirements makes the I/O requests random and variable. The compute layer of the host expands and increases resources to meet the number of VMs, and storage is meeting resources with speedy flash arrays and cache.

The network interconnect simply needs to keep up with the increase of IOPS. Fibre Channel will continue to be the pipe of choice for large enterprise customers because it is the best option for meeting their performance needs, prioritising the flow of traffic from mission-critical applications, and protecting the integrity of data as it traverses the network from application to disk.
There is a reason that Fibre Channel is deployed by 90 per cent of Fortune 100 companies, Fibre Channel is proven in the word’s most demanding data centres.

Kings do not worry about a receding “heir” line
Fibre Channel provides more that just bandwidth for applications. It is ideal for environments where sustaining bandwidth in mission critical applications. There is also the storage angle, servers attached to storage using Fibre Channel get better performance and also get lossless low latency packet transmission. Fibre Channel also allows for environments such as virtual desktop infrastructure, to perform better. There is a large, lossless install base in reliable high performance Fibre Channel. This base of users means that investment in Fibre Channel is protected and the technology will continue to be the ruler and the king of high performance connectivity.

Fibre Channel is still the King. Long live Fibre Channel