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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.
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.
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? --
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 $400 and we'd both be ecstatic.
What's your damage, Heather?
just because previously SCSI was always done in parallel cabeling doesn't mean that it has to be done in parellel. The only change in the scsi protocol to go to serial communication is in selecting which drive gets the bus (There is arbitrated loop and fabric, which work different somehow here) and you get to use a lot more devices on the bus if you want.
fibre channel can run many protocols. ATM, SCSI, and IP come to mind off hand. Just like you can run IPX and IP on the same cable, you can run IP and SCSI on the same cable. SCSI is a well designed protocol. Seperate out the small part relateing to drive selection in a parellel cable and you have an execellent serial protocol that is cheap to design (over starting from scratch)
Fibre is also a solution with few big players- and loads of tiny less-stable providers. I don't want to get stuck on the bleeding edge with a company with a crappy web site [cough. Cionic. Cough.]
[I'm sure cionic is getting slashdotted right now. And from a quick check of network solutions, it seems that the poster has a vested interest in that.]
don't believe the hype
While it looks like Cinonic has handled the drive end of the connection, this doesn't do anything for the host bus adapter end. Fiber Channel HBAs are still pretty expen$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!
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. . .
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