Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)

Fibre Channel is the solution for IT professionals who need reliable, cost-effective information storage and delivery at blazing speeds. With development starting in 1988, ANSI standard approval in 1994, and massive deployment beginning in 1998, Fibre Channel is still growing strong. Fibre Channel is the mature, safe solution for high-speed communications and is the foundation for over 90% of all SAN (Storage Area Network) installations throughout the world.

Today's data explosion presents unprecedented challenges incorporating data warehousing, imaging, integrated audio/video, networked storage, real-time computing, collaborative projects and CAD/CAE. Fibre Channel is simply the easiest, safest and most reliable solution for information storage and retrieval.

Corporate information is a key competitive factor, and Fibre Channel enhances IT departments' ability to access and protect it more efficiently.

In fact, multiple terabytes of Fibre Channel interfaced storage are installed every day! Fibre Channel works equally well for storage, networks, video, data acquisition, and many other applications. Fibre Channel is ideal for reliable, high-speed transport of digital audio/video. Aerospace developers are using Fibre Channel for ultra-reliable, real-time networking.

Fibre Channel is a fast, reliable data transport system that scales to meet the requirements of any enterprise. Today, installations range from small post-production systems on Fibre Channel loop to very large systems linking thousands of users, servers, and storage systems into a switched, Fibre Channel network.

Fibre Channel is ideal for these applications:

High-performance storage
High-performance disk and tape/tape silo IO
Large data bases and data warehouses
Storage backup systems and recovery
Server clusters
Network-based storage (i.e., SANs)
High-performance workgroups
Campus backbones
Digital audio/video networks

Fibre Channel, a powerful, open ANSI standard, has a well-proven track record of economically meeting the challenge with these advantages, to name only a few:

Price Performance Leadership - Fibre Channel delivers cost-effective solutions for storage and networks starting at about $500 per port
Solutions Leadership - Fibre Channel provides versatile connectivity with scalable performance with the strength of a mature, full market of suppliers With over 100 companies, including all of the top 20 server and storage suppliers, product choices ranging in the 1000�s, more than 80 million ports installed to date with an overall market annual revenues of more than a billion dollars [CHECK MATH ON EVERYTHING], you can rest assured that your Fibre Channel investment is preserved, safe and secure.
Reliable - Fibre Channel, the most reliable form of storage communications, sustains an enterprise with assured information delivery. Reliability was designed into Fibre Channel standards and products right from the start.
2 Gigabit Bandwidth Now - Gigabit solutions are becoming the norm today. On the horizon is 10 gigabit-per-second data delivery.
Multiple Topologies - Fibre Channel supports the most protocols with the most published, open standards and released products for protocols such as SCSI, IP, ESCON, VI, and AV. Fibre Channel was designed to be totally transparent and autonomous to the protocol mapped over it. SCSI, TCP/IP, video, or raw data can all take advantage of high-performance, reliable Fibre Channel network.
Scalable - From single point-to-point high-speed links to integrated enterprises with hundreds of servers, Fibre Channel delivers unmatched performance.
Congestion Free - Fibre Channel's credit-based flow control delivers data as fast as the destination buffer is able to receive it, without dropping frames or losing data and without the need for upper-layer retries This is one of the exclusive features of Fibre Channel that make it so well suited for block-level storage data networks and interconnects.
High Efficiency - Real price performance is directly correlated to the efficiency of the technology. Fibre Channel has very little transmission overhead. Most important, the Fibre Channel protocol is specifically designed for highly efficient operation using hardware for protocol offload engines (POE's). Fibre Channel products and installations have long used highly integrated POE's as necessitated by the high-end, high-performance demands of the markets that were early to adopt Fibre Channel, first as an interconnect, then as the key enabling factor to the advent of Storage Area Networking. Fibre Channel simply, and easily, provides the best bang for the buck!
Full Suite of Services - Fibre Channel surpasses all interconnects when it comes to already-released standards and products that are required to build a SAN; inside and out. Fibre Channel pioneered and established throughout the market a mature set of storage network services such as discovery, addressing, LUN zoning, fail-over, management, and security.

Fibre Channel Roadmap - The FCIA established and maintains a roadmap of all of the various speeds, feeds, services, and management tools that make-up the full suite of Fibre Channel interconnect and network solutions. (Click here for ROADMAP)