Hewlett-Packard Co and IBM Corp have joined forces to get a brand new consortium off the ground. FC/Open is expected to come into existence sometime next year in support of efforts to standardise high-speed fibre channel interconnects. Its predecessor organisation, the Fibre Channel Systems Initiative, is already up and running, and is scheduled to reveal itself publicly in six to eight weeks. The Initiative is said to have attracted the major workstation manufacturers. Apparently more adherents are being sought. Its charter is to delineate initial recommendations for computer-to-mass storage, computer-to-computer, computer-to-peripheral, peripheral-to-peripheral, computer-to-outside services and heterogeneous cluster-to-cluster standards via switching. It is specifically a Unix workstation initiative with goals larger than the American National Standards Institution could handle. The Initiative is currently under the management of Hewlett-Packard Co’s Components Group and is headquartered at its San Jose, California facility. After it gets the ball rolling, the Initiative is expected to wither away over the next two years, passing the torch completely to FC/Open. While the Initiative will be smaller and more flexible, FC/Open is aiming for membership of some 50 or 60 companies, 15% of which are end users. Its brief is longer term and written to include missionary work, promotion and oversight of independent interoperability testing and branding. Siemens Components in Cherry Hill, New Jersey is currently charged with its supervision. FC/Open will eventually require its own quarters, staff and budget. The Initiative is said to be trying to keep its overheads down by running as a project within Hewlett but it will still cost upwards of $1m to organise. The idea for a consortium was born of the fibre channel alliance between Hewlett and IBM agreed earlier this year (CI No 1,869), according to Ed Frymoyer, the Hewlett-Packard alliance manager who is also heading up the Initiative. Fibre channel proponents claim the low-latency technology is probably faster and more cost-effective than lead challenger Fibre Distributed Data Interface.
