Origin Of Fibre Channel Technology
The explosive growth of the amount of data in the information age has provided a good opportunity for the development of storage technology. Now information managers are more concerned about how to store, manage and use data safely. Therefore, people not only have higher and higher requirements for storage device capacity and performance, but also put forward technical requirements for storage systems with high performance, high reliability, and long-distance transmission. Fibre Channel (Fiber Channel) technology was born under the drive of this demand.
At present, in the design of storage systems, any business system that involves operating on a large relational database and reading massive data generally tends to adopt a storage area network (Storage Area Networks) architecture. A storage area network (hereinafter referred to as "SAN") is a network system based on a networked I/O storage protocol that enables "any to any" connection and communication between servers and storage devices. The development of SAN has driven the development of Fibre Channel technology, and the development of Fibre Channel architecture has paved the way for the technical conception of SAN.
Fibre Channel technology is a protocol architecture based on Fibre Channel, which was started in 1989, and the corresponding ANSI standard was formulated in October 1994. In addition to optical cable, the transmission medium of Fibre Channel technology has other transmission carriers such as copper cable, but it is usually called optical channel internationally. Fibre Channel technology can be rapidly developed and widely used (reflected in the emergence of a large number of SAN systems using FC technology), not only because Fibre Channel has higher bandwidth, longer connection distance, better security and scalability, More importantly, Fibre Channel technology combines the advantages of channel technology and network technology. Using Fibre Channel network can create a storage area network (SAN) that is different from the well-known local area network (LAN) or even metropolitan area network (MAN). SAN is not a product, but a method of configuring networked storage. Its main idea is to convert the data exchange on the traditional network to the SAN mainly composed of storage devices and database servers. With the help of Fibre Channel technology, SAN supports long-distance communication, and completely separates data storage from application services, so that storage devices can become shared resources that all servers connected to the SAN can access at high speed, security, and reliability. Storage devices, such as disk arrays and tape libraries, work together without going through a dedicated intermediate server. SAN solves the problem that once a large amount of data access occurs in traditional LAN, the network performance will be greatly reduced, so that data access, backup and recovery will not affect the performance of the LAN, fundamentally guarantee the service quality of the application system, and can greatly reduce the network performance. reduce administrative expenses
