Fibre
Channel News
Stopping the CERN Fibre Channel pages
13 November 1998. As I have new commitments in the world of high
energy physics, I don't have enough time anymore to keep track of the developments
in the Fibre Channel market and to condense that information in the CERN
Fibre Channel pages.
Also, there are two organisations that are supposed to do that work,
which are the Fibre Channel Association
and the Fibre Channel Community. Both
have product listings, which unfortunately are not yet as complete as the
CERN pages used to be. The FCA and FClC and the vendors are working
hard to improve this situation.
In the four years that I maintained those pages, I received many responses
of both advanced users and newcomers in the Fibre Channel field, of which
here a few:
"The CERN site has an excellent and very useful summary
of FC manufacturers and products, thanks to your efforts."
"I was very pleased to find your Web page about Fibre Channel. It
gives a nice quick overview of the Fibre Channel products."
"I hope that your initiative will be successful in pushing Fibre
Channel technology."
"Nice summary of FC vendors."
"I've used your web page many times in searching for products"
"Danke fuer deine Aufstellung ueber den Fibre Channel ! Diese hat
mir bei meiner Recherche sehr viel geholfen !!"
"Thanks for the information on these pages, it's very useful."
"Many thanks for maintaining these webpages"
Thanks for all those positive remarks.
Erik
1998 Fibre Channel Technologies Conference
3 August 1998. FCTC (the Fibre Channel Technologies Conference)
will be held on September 15-17, 1998 at the Wyndham (formerly LeBaron)
Hotel in San Jose, CA. A complete program and free registration
for the exhibits and open sessions are available on the Web at www.fibreconference.com
or by calling (800) 351-6000 or (408) 526-9194.
Sony also makes Fibre Channel transceiver chips
5 March 1988. Sony Semiconductor
sells a whole range of Fibre Channel transceiver chips. They also sell
laser drivers and transimpedance amplifiers that can be used in Fibre Channel
applications. Take a look at Sony's
Serial/Optical Communications web page.
Fujitsu makes Fibre Channel transceiver and repeater chips
7 January 1998. Fujitsu Compound
Semiconductor is making Fibre
Channel transceiver and repeater chips. The 64-pin tranceiver chips
have a 10-bit interface and run at 1 Gbps, consuming only 0.55 Watt at
3.3 Volt. Fujitsu is also making Gigabit Ethernet chips.
More disk storage companies
7 January 1998. EMC Corporation
and OneofUs are new companies in
the Fibre Channel storage listings.
ATTO Technologies enters FC market
6 January 1998. ATTO Technologies is a new player in the Fibre Channel
market. The company, which provided SCSI solutions since 1988, started
off immediately with three Fibre Channel products: a 32/64-bit
PCI interface, a hub and a
converter to SCSI.
Systran products and results
6 January 1998. Systran sent me a mail with some updated information
about their Fibre Channel interfaces. You can find the information about
the PCI and PMC interfaces, VME
interface and S-Bus interface.
Systran has dropped the EISA and GIO products.
At CERN we have used the Systran interfaces extensively with our own
software. You might be interested in reading some reports with performance
results: Evaluation
of FC/PMC Cards in the Environment of the ATLAS DAQ Prototype; Performance
Tests with FC/PCI Cards in the Environment of the ATLAS DAQ Prototype;
Experience
with FC Arbitrated Loop
Tachlite: PCI to Fibre Channel chip for storage applications
6 January 1998. HP is now producing the Tachlite.
This is a Fibre Channel protocol chip that connects directly to a 32-bit
or 64-bit PCI bus. The output is a 10-bit interface which connects directly
to industry standard Fibre Channel transceiver chips. The chip is meant
for storage applications using FC Arbitrated Loop.
Old News
CERN - High Speed Interconnect
- FCS
Erik van der Bij - 13 November
1998 - Disclaimer