Quick as a flash: ATTO joins 32Gbit/s Fibre Channel bandwagon

In company with Brocade, Emulex and QLogic, ATTO has launched its 32gig Fibre Channel HBA. Its 32 gig product line centres on Celerity HBAS (host bus adapters) with low profile single and fual-port products. These complement 16Gbit/s product in single, dual and quad-port formats. The 32 gig products support 3,200MB/sec …

[Sir Alien]

Why bother with FC?

Most Ethernet based storages now are pretty good, reliable and fast. For example, CEPH as a block storage system performance really well on good hardware and networking and is "almost" infinitely scalable. I say almost because no one know the actual limits.

Take CERN for example and their 30PB+ storage system on CEPH. It can also be seamlessly upgraded by just taking out the 10Gbit adapter (and switch) and replacing it with a 100Gbit version.It is also fully distributed so has good hardware failure protections in place with automatic recovery in the event of a failure.

- S.A

[Mr. Twinkee]

Re: Why bother with FC?

I think Ethernet works well for many, but the low latency provided by Fibre Channel excels just in what the article says, Flash Storage. When you have nodes connected via Ethernet and not using RDMA you have long lags in latency. Fibre Channel allows users to share data at extremely low latency meaning you can move more data faster. I have seen users abandon Ethernet connected storage after learning that 10Gb did not even equal 8Gb Fibre! Now with 25/40/50GbE we may see some comparisons to 32Gb FC. I would bet that 32Gb FC is still faster than 25/40/50 in the native Ethernet but may be closer to being on par if RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) is in place...but that is still a ways out from adoption giving Fibre Channel time to move toward 128Gb more quickly than anyone expected... and should threaten 100GbE.

Now, I know its not for everyone.. but FC is far from dead. I just upgraded a client who had problems with a 2 year old DAS system with nodes connected via Ethernet... simple vMotions took up to 6 hours with SAS drives... turning his old (using existing storage) system into a SAN with FC allowed live migrations and vMotion to complete in minutes Happy customer.

[Anonymous Coward]

my poor mincers

one of those springs is a bit cock-eyed

[QLP]

fual-port?

"low profile single and fual-port products"

Methinks that should be "dual-port products".

[Jon Massey]

32Gb or GB?

How can 32 Gb/s provide 3200MB/s throughput or am I missing something?

[j2f8j8j2fj]

Re: 32Gb or GB?

Assuming 8b/10b encoding

(32gbit/8)*(8/10)=3.2GB/s or 3,200MB/s

If it's using 64b/66b the speed comes to approx 3.88GB/s.

[j2f8j8j2fj]

Fiberchannel has lost, ethernet is up to 100gbps if an organization can afford it. For latency, Infiniband is the better choice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Game over

Ethernet has already hit 100gbps and Infiniband offers better latency. Why waste money on FC?