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San Francisco, September 8, 2003
- The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA), a non-profit international
organization of manufacturers, systems integrators and vendors today announced
that twelve companies met July 21-25 in Colorado Springs, CO to test a new
Fibre Channel test suite for use in SANmark™ compliance tests. Of the
attendees, six were hardware vendors and six were Fibre Channel test vendors.
The attending companies made significant progress testing the host bus adapter
(HBA) application program interface (API) test suite, which will be released
later this year in support of FCIA's goal of providing end-to-end SANmark
solutions.
In addition, capabilities demonstrated during the plugfest included the
complete testing of two multi-vendor fabrics, each of which had five switches.
The test process demonstrated that fail-over and recovery presented no problems
to continued data flow. Even when a link failed, the full mesh fabric with
maximum throughput traffic performed well. The fabric, upon failure of a single
inter-switch link (ISL), recovered using the remaining paths. When the failed
ISL was replaced, the fabric resumed full bandwidth use of all ISLs, thereby
regaining the performance level that was temporarily lost due to the failure.
All of the switches in the multi-vendor fabric were SANmark qualified and the
multi-vendor fabric performed extremely well, showing the benefits of the FCIA
SANmark program.
Bill Martin, Sr. Principal Engineer, Brocade Corp. and Chair of the FCIA
SANmark technical committee, stated, "Fibre Channel plugfests provide myriad
benefits to FCIA members and the industry, especially to the end-users of Fibre
Channel products. FCIA is working diligently to make Fibre Channel products
dependable, reliable and easy to integrate into comprehensive SAN solutions. To
achieve this goal, products must comply with applicable SANmark test suites.
Development of SANmark test suites reflects FCIA's determination to provide the
storage industry with the best Fibre Channel products possible."
The next plugfest event will be held in January, 2004. The focus of future
plugfests will be to test and evaluate the behavior of Fibre Channel extended
over internet protocol (IP) using FCIP. For more information about this event, please contact Bill Martin at:
bmartin@brocade.com.
About the Fibre Channel Industry Association
The Fibre Channel Industry Association is a non-profit, international
organization of manufacturers, system integrators, developers, system vendors,
industry professionals and end users. With about 100 member companies and FCIA
affiliates in the United States and Japan, FCIA is committed to delivering a
broad base of Fibre Channel infrastructure technology to support a wide array
of industry applications within the mass storage and IT-based arenas. FCIA
working groups focus on specific aspects of the technology, targeting both
vertical and horizontal markets including storage, video, networking and SAN
management. For more information on FCIA, please visit our web site at
www.fibrechannel.org, contact us at
info@fibrechannel.org or call
1-415-561-6270. For information on SANmark, please visit
www.sanmark.org.
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