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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical RE: An area for operations growth - Storage Area Nets in MANS
Sorry for any confusion. Fiber channel is old tech for sure and there was no implied intent to evaluate the tech itself. Roxane has apparently observed that on devices like the core directors the number of fiber channel ports being ordered is going up dramatically.... apparently about the only thing it makes sense to do with such ports is to use them for SANs. The remark was not intended to be definitive or in great depth and was added almost as an after thought at the end of a short (35 minute) interview at the san jose airport. Certainly there is major movement in large fiber based in metropolitan areas that have been built and are being built by banks, and fortune 500 kinds of enterprises as they move a LOT of data and voice traffic off the PSTN and on to new cheap equipment that they can get a much better return for on the dollars they invest. All a part of the commoditization and decentralization of telecom. I am not an expert in the application of the technology being discussed. However at some time in the next six month i probably will want to explore this in much more depth. >Although these new real time applica tions will clearly send more data over the network, the real killer application is going to be remote storage and synchronous storage. Synchronous storage means that you have two large servers doing the exact same thing at the exact same time in two different locations. COOK Report: Like a decentralized disk array? Googin: Yes. The backbone has to be incredibly fast because you cannot complete a transaction until you have acknowledgments from both disk drives. This will happen. Probably this year. What they are already doing is taking fiber channel and putting that on a Cienna Core Director optical switch port. Half of the ports being sold on the Core Director now are fiber channel. They aren't even Ethernet. And this is used for storage area nets (SANs). These are corporate MANs and will have nothing to do with sales to service providers. They are bypass business services where the storage arrays may not be more than a kilometer or two apart. These SANs are backing up continuously terabytes of data. We are talking huge applications that will use every bit of access to every bit of capacity they can get. -- ============================================================= The COOK Report on Internet, 431 Greenway Ave, Ewing, NJ 08618 USA 609 882-2572 (PSTN) 703 738-6031 (Vonage) [email protected] Subscription info & prices at http://cookreport.com/subscriptions.shtml Fiber & Wireless as First Mile Technology - Fiber Business Models & Architecture, July- September 2003, 130 pages available at http://cookreport.com/12.04-06.shtml =============================================================
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