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Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array

Posted by timothy on from the woodscrews dept.

skarphedin writes "There's an interesting story here on a do-it-yourself fibre channel array. These guys make one for under $250 and it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases." You know you want one.

1 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. SCSI vs. Fiber Channel by snowtigger · · Score: 5, Informative

    Where I used to work, we had a few Sun servers with FC disk arrays.

    Here's the Sun engineer's explanation of why FC is so interesting for servers:

    1) The FC protocol has a 100MByte/s dedicated bandwidth to data. The communication between disks etc. will not interfer with this bandwidth.

    2) Modern SCSI has two modes: one for data (burst mode) and one communication mode. The communication mode is a lot slower (first scsi standard) in order to remain compatible with older disks. This means that scsi is a lot more advantageous to users reading large files than small files.

    This is where FC becomes interesting: If you have a striped disk array, you will read many small segments from different disks instead of large segments from single disks. In this special case, FC is faster than SCSI, even though it is "slower" by looking at the burst rates in the specs.