Fibre Channel

    An ANSI standard
   originally intended for high-speed SANs connecting
   servers, disc arrays, and backup devices, also later
   adapted to form the physical layer of Gigabit Ethernet.

   Development work on Fibre channel started in 1988 and it was
   approved by the ANSI standards committee in 1994, running at
   100Mb/s.  More recent innovations have seen the speed of Fibre
   Channel SANs increase to 10Gb/s.  Several topologies are
   possible with Fibre Channel, the most popular being a number
   of devices attached to one (or two, for redundancy) central
   Fibre Channel switches, creating a reliable infrastructure
   that allows servers to share storage arrays or tape libraries.

   One common use of Fibre Channel SANs is for high availability
   databaseq clusters where two servers are connected to one
   highly reliable RAID array.  Should one server fail, the
   other server can mount the array itself and continue
   operations with minimal downtime and loss of data.

   Other advanced features include the ability to have servers
   and hard drives seperated by hundreds of miles or to rapidly
   mirror data between servers and hard drives, perhaps in
   seperate geographic locations.

   <Fibre Channel Industry Association> (FCIA).

   (2003-09-27)