Fibre Channel Industry Association Develops 128Gb FC

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced Gen 6 FC, representing the industry’s fastest industry standard networking protocol that enables SANs of up to 128Gb FC and includes features that improve network reliability, energy efficiency, and operational simplicity.

Gen 6 FC is the next generation of FC designed to address performance, reliability, and scalability requirements for hyper-scale virtualization, SSD storage technology, and new data center architectures.

Solutions are expected to be broadly available in 2016.

“Businesses continue to invest in FC to power their most mission- and business-critical environment,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, storage systems and software, IDC. “The continued evolution of the FC standard is important for supporting the huge global installed base, which continues to grow at a steady pace. With the development of Gen 6 FC, enterprises should feel confident that their FC investments are secure and that continued innovation from the vendor community will further optimize performance, security, reliability and operational simplicity to better optimize both flash and traditional storage infrastructures.”

Gen 6 doubles the 16Gb FC data throughput of 3,200MB/s to 32Gb FC, which enables 6,400MB/s full-duplex speeds. Gen 6 also provides an option to quadruple 32Gb FC to 128Gb FC throughput, thereby achieving full-duplex speeds of 25,600 MB/s, based upon the seamless inter- and backward-compatibility of FC technology.

“Continued innovation for the FC standard is designed to extend its position as industry’s most reliable and robust storage networking solution, which is used for today’s most mission-critical enterprise applications,” said Skip Jones, FCIA chairman. “Enterprises and service providers can look forward to new innovations from the community of compute, network and storage vendors that will develop next-generation solutions in 2016 based on the Gen 6 standard in order to leverage its advanced feature set.”

At 32Gb FC, Gen 6 FC doubles the data throughput of the current 16Gb FC FC standard.

In addition to faster speeds, key features of Gen 6 FC include:

• Forward Error Correction (FEC): Improves the reliability of links through the automatic detection and recovery from bit errors that occur in high speed networks. FEC helps minimize or avoid data stream errors that can lead to application performance degradation or outages.
• Energy Efficiency: Lower energy consumption is achieved by allowing the FC optical connectors to operate in a stand-by mode (or ‘nap’) multiple times each second.
• Backward Compatibility: 128Gb FC and 32Gb FC FC supports complete and total backward compatibility to 16Gb FC and 8Gb FC networks. Ensuring investment protection, Gen 6 automatically configures to the fastest supported speed between any two network points, and requiring zero user intervention.

“FC’s forward and backward compatibility over the last several generations has been a hallmark of the technology that continues in the Gen 6 standard. This has been achieved by talented people working together taking advantage of technological advancements, both in the protocol and interconnect fields. Because of this Amphenol is able to continue to supply FC customers cost effective interconnect solutions,” said Greg McSorley, technical business manager, Amphenol Corp.

“Gen 6 FC will deliver performance and robustness to propel our customers’ SANs into a new age of advanced capabilities. We are developing new solutions based on 128Gb FC and 32Gb FC and look forward to bringing these to market in 2016,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, data center storage and solutions, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

“Business success increasingly depends on the real time delivery of massive throughput applications to both internal and external customers. We continue to design and deploy connectivity solutions that help our customers optimize their data center investments today while preparing them for seamless adoption of next-generation technologies developed to handle data rates Gen 6 protocol will enable of up to 128 Gb FC,” said Kevin Ehringer, CEO and founder, Data Center Systems.

“Gen 6 FC solutions will go beyond a boost in bandwidth, to new features that increase scalability for cloud workloads, improve network reliability and that are optimized for flash/SSD. Gen 6 FC solutions will also offer operational simplicity, with backward compatibility spanning more than a decade, given the ecosystems’ commitment to maintaining compatibility to current switch and storage investments. We are currently working on building a new class of Gen 6 FC solutions as part of our strategic roadmap, and are committed to the long term future of FC,” said Shaun Walsh, SVP marketing and corporate development, Emulex Corp.

“The storage industry is responding to a dramatic shift in customer requirements, from mission critical tier 1 features for all flash arrays to those same tier 1 features at midrange price points. The performance, reliability and scalability of Gen 6 FC are well aligned with HP’s efforts to address both of these customer desires with a single, polymorphic array design that provides unbeatable simplicity and investment protection,” said Craig Nunes, VP marketing, storage, HP.

“FC has long been the most reliable, secure, scalable and efficient storage networking protocol for enterprise computing. The performance and features of the Gen 6 standard ensure QLogic customers will continue relying on FC to meet their future requirements for hyper-scale virtualization, solid-state storage technologies and new data center architectures,” said Vikram Karvat, VP marketing, QLogic Corp.

“High throughput and low latency make SSDs a natural fit in high-end SANs. Gen 6 FC, with a data rate of up to 128 Gb FC and ultra-low latency, is a perfect complement for high performance SSDs in mission critical applications,” said Paul Wassenberg, chair, SNIA Solid State Storage Initiative.