There is no agreement on what should be the next high-speed disk interface, but Sun Microsystems Inc is sticking firmly to the Fiber Channel and is proposing an evolution it calls FC-AL, for Fiber Channel Arbitrated Loop – and has won some heavyweight support. Hewlett-Packard Co, Quantum Corp, Seagate Technology Inc, Silicon Graphics Inc and Unisys Corp have stepped up to lend their names to the development effort. Sun claims Fiber Channel offers up to 10 times the performance of SCSI storage, high availability, and robust configurations. FC-AL is intended to meet demand for much higher data bandwidth from larger disk arrays and provides redundant data paths, hot-pluggable components, multiple host connections, and dual ported drives, and provides a full-duplex data rate of 100M-bytes per second, compared with a typical 20M-bytes per second SCSI data rate. Sun claims to have installed well over 1Pb – Petabytes – of Fiber Channel-attached storage that is currently in use around the world. It notes that the Fiber Channel Loop Community will be offering technology demonstrations at Comdex/Fall this month.
