Ansi INCITS T11 Committee in Letter Ballot Process on 16Gb FC Standard

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced that the 16GFC development within ANSI INCITS T11.2 Committee is proceeding at an accelerated pace as the FC-PI-5 document is entering the letter ballot process. The ballot process is a major milestone that marks the technical stability and completeness necessary for vendors to commit to silicon on their upcoming designs based upon the FC-PI-5 standard.

With 16GFC, users will experience twice the bandwidth of 8GFC – doubling savings in price/performance, power and port density. Transparently, without user intervention, 16GFC is auto-negotiated backward compatibly to 8GFC and 4GFC, ensuring that the user need not make a forklift remove and replace of their 4GFC or 8GFC Fibre Channel SAN to integrate individual 16GFC products at the pace of their own choosing. 16GFC provides a natural value migration from 8GFC and ensures the end user full confidence that 8GFC purchases made today are preserved investments for tomorrow.

"The timely completion of this standard demonstrates continued industry commitment towards the FCIA Fibre Channel roadmap," says Skip Jones, FCIA Chairman. "Given expected product roll-outs in the 2011 timeframe, 16GFC promises to provide data center managers with higher speeds and cost savings double that of today’s 8GFC and near double of today’s 10G Ethernet."

16GFC will propel enterprise-class technologies such as high-density virtualization by doubling the number of ports that can be virtualized on a single physical FC port and thereby utilize the improved efficiencies that will come with the higher density multi-processor cores, improved single root hypervisors, high-speed storage such as solid state disk drives, and new generation server busses such as 3rd generation PCIe.

Examples of user benefits of this future technology include: