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1.3 Fibre Functions
1.3.1 Overview
Fibre Channel is a set of standards under the auspices of ANSI (American
National Standards Institute). Fibre Channel combines the best features from
SCSI bus and IP protocols into a single standard interface, including high-
performance data transfer (up to 400 MB per second), low error rates, multiple
connection topologies, scalability, and more. It retains the SCSI command-set
functionality, but use a Fibre Channel controller instead of a SCSI controller to
provide the network interface for data transmission. In today's fast-moving com-
puter environments, Fibre Channel is the serial data transfer protocol choice
for high-speed transportation of large volumes of information between
workstation, server, mass storage subsystems, and peripherals.
Physically, the Fibre Channel can be an interconnection of multiple communi-
cation points, called N_Ports. The port itself only manages the connection
between itself and another such end-port which, which could either be part of
a switched network, referred to as a Fabric in FC terminology, or a point-to-
point link. The fundamental elements of a Fibre Channel Network are Port and
node. So a node can be a computer system, storage device, or Hub/Switch.
This chapter describes the Fibre-specific functions available in the Fibre
channel RAID controller. Optional functions have been implemented for Fibre
channel operation only available in the Web browser-based RAID manager.
The LCD and VT-100 can't configure the options available for Fibre channel
RAID controller.
1.3.2 Three ways to connect (FC Topologies)
A topology defines the interconnection scheme. It defines the number of de-
vices that can be connected. Fibre Channel supports three different logical or
physical arrangements (topologies) for connecting the devices into a network:
Point-to-Point
Arbitrated Loop(AL)
Switched (Fabric)
1-10
Introduction
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