What is Fibre Channel?
Fibre Channel is a high-speed data transfer technology that is designed to connect general purpose computers, mainframes, and supercomputers to storage devices. Fibre Channel provides in-order, lossless delivery of block data. The technology connects devices using fabric (Fibre Channel switch) topologies and point-to-point topologies.
Fibre Channel SANs are often deployed for low latency applications best suited to block-based storage, such as databases used for high-speed online transactional processing (OLTP), such as those found in banking, online ticketing, and virtual environments. Fibre Channel typically runs on optical fiber cables within and between data centers but can also run on copper cabling.
A storage area network (SAN) is a dedicated network used for storage connectivity between host servers and shared storage - typically shared arrays that deliver block-level data storage.
Fibre Channel fabrics can be extended over distance for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuance. Most SANs are designed with redundant fabrics.
Begun in 1988, the Fibre Channel technology is standardized in the Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)-accredited standards committee.
The Fibre Channel Physical and Signaling Interface (FC-PH) standard was first published in 1994. This has been superseded by Fibre Channel Physical Interface (FC-PI) series of standards and Fibre Channel Framing and Signaling (FC-FS) series of standards.