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Fibre Channel For The Masses
Diesel Dave writes: "Fibre Channel is an awesome technology handling serial Gigabit transmission rates of both SCSI and IP over up to 30 Meters of 2 pair Copper or 10 Kilometers of optical cable, with up to 126 hosts or devices per loop.(WOW!) The newest FC runs at 2GHz. That's up to 400 Megabytes per second in full duplex mode. The problem of course is FC is normally very expensive. However, many of the hackers out there have noticed large amounts 1GHz FC equipment is being dumped on Ebay for a song. (I purchased new 18GB Barracuda drives for $70 each!) The problem is cabling up those funky 40 pin SCA drives without buying a $3000 8 bay enclosure. After much searching I have just found a company called Cinonic Systems that is making low cost Fibre Channel drive and cable adapters that work with plain old CAT5 ethernet cable! As far as I'm concerned firewire, parallel SCSI, and Gigabit ethernet are now dead technologies." It's not all that big a device either -- probably Cinonic is not alone in selling such a thing. Rather cool to connect up hard drives with CAT5, too -- not PITA ribbon cables.
Perhaps if you had actually had a look at the product on the website, you would have known that this has nothing to do with optical cable. This runs over STP Cat 5 cabling.
However, I do think that people should be more forthcoming in who they are when they flagrantly advertise their own sites.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
As noted in this post, the original article poster (Diesel Dave) has a psychosis.com mail address; the company mentioned in the article is owned by the same person as that who owns psychosis.com. I think we can presume that timothy has just been fooled into giving Diesel Dave some free advertising...
Administrative Contact:
Cinege, David dcinege@psychosis.com
100 PerCenta, Notsure Blvd.
Someplacen, FL 33300
US
954-661-7484
$ whois cinonic.com
Administrative Contact:
Cinege, David dcinege@psychosis.com
100 PerCenta, Notsure Blvd.
Someplacen, FL 33300
US
954-661-7484
Must have been hard registering the domain last April if he didn't hear about it until now. Interesting address, too.
and, to add to your statement, gigabit ethernet and its successors are being driven by entities very interested in *PACKET SWITCHING*, but not necessarily STREAM switching.
one of the primary design tenets of fibre-channel was to excel at the streaming of data. the consortium's design philosophy was: stream efficiently first, worry about packet-switching later.
given that, fibre channel is generally considered NOT THE BEST at doing general-purpose packet switching (say IP / (FC-SF or FC-AL)). it's just simply not what it was designed to do.
saying gigabit ethernet (and all other CSMA/CD over fiber derivatives) are dead is either very ignorant, or is a beautiful example of FUD, and thus quite misleading.
Peter
Here is a search for fibre channel at ebay
/. editors not be maintaining their usually high level of integrity and *confirming* their stories...
I cannot find this "dump of 'ew 18GB Barracuda drives for $70 each'" $30 for the FC2-2DB9 and I might consider it... but right now these 'dumped drives' seem a little vapourous - could our
All I could find even close to what's described above was:
36 GB IBM FCHDD
9 GB Seagate FCHDD
Let's take a look at network and disk technologies.
First, disk technologies have been increasing in speed at 2x intervals. First there was plain SCSI (~10MB/s). Then scsi 2(~20MB/s). Then fast SCSI (~40MB/s). The Ultra SCSI (~80MB/s), now Ultra SCSI 3 (~160MB/s). (I might have misplaced the names of the scsi technologies, but the idea is the same).
Also, let's look at FibreChannel. There was FC-25 (25MB/s), then FC-50 (no commerial organization used this, but it was 50MB/s), and currently, FC-100 is the dominant technology.
Again, 2x intervals.
Now let's look at ethernet. It's jumping at 10x intervals. 1Mb/s, 10Mb/s(Ethernet), 100Mb/s(FastEthernet), 1Gb/s (Gigabit, which incendentally is theoretically faster than FibreChannel... 125MB/s), and 10Gb/s is on the
way.
So by taking historical scaling into account, ethernet dead? Yeah right. Now that's not to say
that you'll actually ever realize the full bandwidth of any of these technologies. You still have mechanical parts in these drives. Caching and I/O randomness can either help or hurt your performance.
Loser? I wouldn't say that. He's got free advertising... something every business wants. I think it's quite funny myself. I wonder how often this has occured before.
STP also works over gigabit ethernet hardware (but only at gigabit speeds). It will probably work over 10gigabit ethernet, when that is available in quantity.
Why use special disk interface hardware, if network hardware has better bandwidth, latency, and is cheaper?
Come on people! Do your homework before you start whining!
Search on bp6.com for 'Fibre Channel' and you'll come up with an article about a BP6 user that did this months ago. If you want to skip reading the article, go here or here. Then again, they're using ethernet instead of serial, but that's damn close, IMHO.
Props go to sandin. I've got my qla2100 =)
As a fairly long-time Slashdot member (5 digit id), he should really have known that some paranoid/anal geek would figure it out PDQ.
Maybe what he meant to say was...
"I have just founded a company that sells..."
:-)
Cinonic is the name of the company selling the devices.
psychosis.com is the email address domain of the submitter.
www.cinonic.com and www.psychosis.com have the same IP address.
Whois data for both domains shows the same individual involved with both.
cinonic and you'll have to type psychosis.com
Suspicious or coincidence?
With 400 megabytes per second, Mozilla might actually load quite fast!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
A couple of fibre thingies that have worked for me:
Transduction has good enclosures for pretty cheap--they aren't razor-thin, but they work.
ICP Vortex makes RAID cards, including Linux support.
They're both pretty helpful in the CS department, too, but please don't abuse that--enclosure and card are both in the $2000 range.
It's really sad that they chose to use this route to show off their cool tech. If the first line had read something more like "I have a small company that makes cat5 to fc adapters, and I figured the slashdot crowd would have been interested", I probably would have bought some of their little product. Now, because of their successful attempt to fool slashdot moderators into posting free advertising and not calling it as such, I can only assume that they will attempt to fool me the consumer on other things. Now I _won't_ buy from this company....
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I was my companies representative to the ANSI standard committee that wrote the Fiber Channel specification at time of it's creation. Fiber Channel wasn't quite created "to excel at the streaming of data," although that was an important consideration. That was the design philosophy of HIPPI (High Performance Parallel Interface), another standard being written by the same committee at that time. The HIPPI explicit expression was create a "firehose for data." A goal HIPPI excelled in from the start (less than 2% of total bandwidth (800Mbs) was consumed by other than data). Fiber Channel was designed to allow very high data rates from dedicated devices. Many control maechanisms were included to allow this. That effort also made Fiber Channel slow to start and switch. Fiber Channel owes much to IBM's ideas of main frame computer I/O channels being very high throughput even if slow to start. In fact, the original proposal came from IBM. One of the things they wanted to get out of making it a standard was cheap commodity disks. Peace
Marty
you just heard is thousands of /. users starting up new browsers to search for 18gb FC drives for $70. Man, if I got a deal like that, I'd resell 'em to my boss for $400 and we'd both be ecstatic.
What's your damage, Heather?
just because previously SCSI was always done in parallel cabeling doesn't mean that it has to be done in parellel. The only change in the scsi protocol to go to serial communication is in selecting which drive gets the bus (There is arbitrated loop and fabric, which work different somehow here) and you get to use a lot more devices on the bus if you want.
fibre channel can run many protocols. ATM, SCSI, and IP come to mind off hand. Just like you can run IPX and IP on the same cable, you can run IP and SCSI on the same cable. SCSI is a well designed protocol. Seperate out the small part relateing to drive selection in a parellel cable and you have an execellent serial protocol that is cheap to design (over starting from scratch)
Fibre is also a solution with few big players- and loads of tiny less-stable providers. I don't want to get stuck on the bleeding edge with a company with a crappy web site [cough. Cionic. Cough.]
[I'm sure cionic is getting slashdotted right now. And from a quick check of network solutions, it seems that the poster has a vested interest in that.]
don't believe the hype
I deal with fibre channel storage for a living and getting the drives is indeed possible to do cheaply, the problem always was the box you gotta stick em into...big bucks. And btw, no you don't gotta assign an IP address to the drive, the drive will have its own unique identifier WWN. While it is indeed possible to run IP over fibre channel, most devices run SCSI3 instead. Look into the fibre channel specs, its pretty cool stuff. I'm actually not sure if anyone is encapsulating IP over fibre channel these days. The only problem now is shelling out over a grand for a nice jaycorp/emulex/qlogic HBA :)
While it looks like Cinonic has handled the drive end of the connection, this doesn't do anything for the host bus adapter end. Fiber Channel HBAs are still pretty expen$ive, especially if you have to add a copper GBIC to them. There's also the issue of drivers for Linux (hey, this is Slashdot, after all); while there are some fiber channel drivers in the tree, there are more out there. Be careful before you drop a lot of bucks on FC drives and adapters to make sure you can get an HBA that you will be able to use for your system.
--
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Frankly, I'm going to be getting on Ebay as fast as I can and hope that Malda doesn't start sucking up these drives for use on the /. servers!
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Now you guys can all test GFS (GLobal Filesystem) it's yet another journaled file system for linux. However this one is different. It's cluster aware. With this FS you can really use all those disks and FC cards you are buying from E-Bay. You can actually mount the same fs as though it's local on all the machines that can see the drives on your FC-AL or Fabric.
"If you love someone, set them free. If they come home, set them on fire." - George Carlin
I know this is drifting a little off-topic, but I just can't help myself. SCSI has some good points, but it also has some pretty severe warts. Things like disconnect/reconnect and tagged command queuing are good - unless you consider them so obvious and necessary that any interface lacking them is brain-dead. Some aspects of SCSI error reporting are good, such as the way that an error reply can specify exactly which bit in a request caused it to be rejected. Very nice.
Now for some of the warts. The termination and ID-assignment issues in the original SCSI spec drove many people insane. The speed/width negotiations are still having that effect. The handling of resets still leaves much to be desired, particularly in a multi-initiator environment. Similarly, the way sense data are maintained (or not) sucks rocks in a multi-initiator. The lack of AEN support is not really a protocol flaw, but it's annoying enough that I have to mention it anyway. Some of these issues are specific to old-style parallel SCSI, but some others are shared with FC.
The long and the short of it is that, at a protocol level, SCSI is light-years beyond IDE but still somewhat short of what I'd call a "well designed protocol".
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
i'm assuming that someone would eventually insist that i backed up my statements with some sources.
:)
the sources i can provide with 5 minutes of research are, sadly, weak, but here goes:
Brocade, a very highly respected manufacturer of FC switching products, has a discussion about this very topic here.
also, as someone else already mentioned in another post under this article, a counterpoint as researched by SGI is here.
keep in mind that this is still a research project and probably can't be considered ready for prime-time yet, but it shows tremendous promise and validates the counterpoints made almost 10 years ago now quite well.
whether you agree with these sources or not, the prevailing opinions for years have been both what brocade *AND* sgi state.
half the camp said "FC is designed for high-bandwidth streaming, ethernet is too laden with baggage", while the other half said "but if we are smart (maybe even tricky) about the way we implement a,b and c, we should be able to make it a moot point."
so, be your own judge
Peter
I think not. We have a lot more than 30 metres to worry about in our network. FibreChannel is pretty nifty tech (esp FibreChannel Fabric) but I can't see running optical cable all through the house. We only installed Cat 5 a year ago. . .
SCSI is designed for parallel data, fiber isnt parallel.
IP is at least serial, but its really too high a level for these things isnt it....
I mean do we have to assign hdd an IP address now, lots of unneeded headers for IP on hdd's....
I really dont see the need for this hdd interface type, why not keep network machines instead of individual devices ?
I wouldnt have one on my machine.
Point being that if you ask around, somebody will be handing it out...
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Diesel Dave writes: "... After much searching I have just found a company called Cinonic Systems that is making low cost Fibre Channel drive and cable adapters that work with plain old CAT5 ethernet cable! ..."
... and further down ...
Diesel Dave's email address is dave@psychosis.com.
A WHOIS lookup for cinonic.com: Registrant:
David Cinege
100 PerCenta, Notsure Blvd.
Someplacen, FL 33300
US
Administrative Contact:
Cinege, David dcinege@psychosis.com
I really hope this is either a coincidence or Dave here is just doing the company a favor by registering a domain and hosting it for them after searching so far and wide for them.
zsazsa
The drawback the USB has which SCSI and FireWire (which is based off SCSI) is that USB is a centalized design. All data from a USB device passes through the USB controller on your main system bus effectively limiting your aggregate bandwidth to the bandwidth available on your main system bus. This communication scheme also limits the connectivity of USB devices, they have to pass through a central controller in order to talk to one another. SCSI and FireWire devices all have their own minicontrollers which enables them to act independantly. Since every SCSI device has its own controller data never has to pass through a central hub allowing devices you potentially have higher bandwidth than your main system bus. If anything around right now replaces Fibre channel connection it will most likely be an overclocked version of FireWire. FireWire is for the most part serialized SCSI.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I have no idea where you got this idea from, but its lack of accuracy is fairly profound. FireWire and Fibre Channel aren't even close to compatible. They use different hardware, different protocols, different strategies; they're designed for different uses, sold to different markets.
FireWire lives somewhere between USB and Fibre Channel, but is not related to either one. It is designed for media devices, consumer disk storage, etc. It's a useful bus for hot-plugging peripherals; a convenient way to attach scanners, cameras, portable storage, and so on. It can transfer data fast enough to avoid frustrating consumers. It's convenient, resilient, and cheap.
Fibre channel is a streaming system for RAID applications. IP over fibre channel - at least when I was last working on it - is kind of secondary. It's more of a "you get this for free" ability; you don't run fibre channel to everyone's desktop to provide an Internet connection. Fibre channel is for when you have a couple dozen Silicon Graphics boxes, a half terabyte of Barracudas on a rack with a fabric box or two, and you want to edit video without waiting for file copies. It is for streaming massive quantities of data at high speeds. I don't know if this is still true, but it used to be the case that most PC motherboard buses could not supply data as fast as fibre channel could absorb it. This is heavy duty serious stuff.
I suggest you not get any more ideas from wherever you found this one.
-Mars
i got two more drives from there just a few hours ago =)
:
brings a grand total of 27G for $51 (not including the shipping, which is where you get screwed...$12.50/drive)
ebay has 'em though:
here
pricewatch has 'em too:
here
or, one more place
here
Anyone released physical benchmarks of the cost/performance savings by using this method? I'd really like to see what the FC2-2DB9 Interface Adapter looks like as well. If this does turn out to be a viabile alternative, I'd love to see how Adaptec and the other SCSI manufactures would compete with this. - d
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