What's After Fibre Channel?

By Lucas Mearian and Mark Hall

October 15, 2001 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - James Nardi oversees hundreds of terabytes of data. Sometimes, the disks that it all resides on get hammered more than 10,000 times a second. Sometimes, they get requests only once in a blue moon.

"We can't use just one disk technology and satisfy all our storage needs," says Nardi, director of Web hosting special operations at Edgewood, Colo.-based Verio Inc., one of the world's largest Internet hosting providers.

So Verio has a significant investment in Fibre Channel technology, which delivers excellent results for demanding storage needs. But the company, like so many others, is constantly looking beyond Fibre Channel for future storage solutions. Some of the leading contenders to displace Fibre Channel are iSCSI, Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP), Internet Fibre Channel and, in the near future, InfiniBand.

Verio is looking at all of them. It has full-time technology evaluators in Virginia and Colorado who are dedicated to checking out the latest in advanced storage and other systems.

"We're pretty aggressive about embracing new technology, especially for our large and medium enterprise customers," Nardi says.

The company uses Fibre Channel-based storage-area networks (SAN) and Gigabit Ethernet-switched disk drives, and it's even exploring iSCSI to stay ahead of the technology curve.

But a specific technology is never the most important issue, Nardi explains. "Users don't pay for a particular disk configuration," he says. "They pay for capacity, reliability and performance."

Future Contenders

These technologies could eclipse Fibre Channel for storage connectivity in the next few years:

iSCSI: Under this draft specification from Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM, SCSI codes are generated from user requests and the data is encapsulated into IP packets for transmission over an Ethernet connection. It overcomes SCSI’s latency problem and 50-meter distance barrier but may have security risks.

Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP): Developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, FCIP enables the transmission of Fibre Channel information by tunneling data between SANs over IP networks. It’s especially suited for data sharing over a geographically distributed enterprise.

Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP): This hybrid technology is a version of FCIP that moves Fibre Channel data over IP networks using the iSCSI protocols. It’s designed to interconnect existing Fibre Channel SANs.

The University of Utah in Salt Lake City doesn't have paying customers with penalty-laden service-level agreements, so it can push the envelop a bit further than even technology-rich service providers. It's currently piloting eight SCSI-based storage systems that send block-level data over Ethernet using IP—an approach known as iSCSI.

"It's up to your imagination to come up with creative ways to play with this," says Brian Haymore, the school's senior systems engineer. "Most people already run Ethernet and SCSI, so all you're doing is combining those two pieces together."

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