Fibre Channel Dying?

[Jeff Bernstein]

Sean,

Well said. I would opine, however, that Gigabit filesharing still has issues with scalability. It also has issues with busy networks and servers. As packets start getting out of order from the increased traffic, it becomes more difficult for the TCP buffers to keep everything in order, which then causes dropped frames.

Someone mentioned that Fibre Channel was the only fiber-based solution out there. O’ contrar monfrar! Check out Infiniband. It’s very fast, 20Gbit, for starters, and components are half the cost of Fibre Channel. The current missing ingredient is Infiniband storage. Though, I think CalDigit’s new stuff is Infiniband, yet they don’t mention it by name.

Jeff Bernstein

Digital Desktop Consulting
Apple Pro Video VAR
XSAN Certified
MetaSAN Master Reseller

323-653-7611

[Sean Oneil]

[Jeff Bernstein] “Someone mentioned that Fibre Channel was the only fiber-based solution out there. O’ contrar monfrar! Check out Infiniband. It’s very fast, 20Gbit, for starters, and components are half the cost of Fibre Channel. The current missing ingredient is Infiniband storage. Though, I think CalDigit’s new stuff is Infiniband, yet they don’t mention it by name.”

I have checked out Infiniband 🙂

I would LOVE to have an Infiniband SAN. You can find DUAL 10gb adapters on ebay for a few hundred bucks. But an IB SAN is not possible, at least not with Mac clients.

There is not a single Mac driver for an Infiniband HBA. Small Tree made one to show off some cluster thing Apple did. One of those supercomputer university projects. But they don’t sell the driver, it only works with a revision of a certain card, and it only works on PowerPC Macs. Not Intel.

Also, IB requires special software in addition to a driver. You need something called a subnet manager (whatever that means). Without it, you have to use an IB switch. And those are very, very, very expensive.

But as far as available storage, there are options. Open-E iSCSI target software support a few IB cards. You’d have to build it yourself though.

[Jeremy Garchow]

The Sonnet drives are connected through infiniband at the back of the drive itself, then they connect to SAS at the ATTO card.

Just FEI. (For Everyone’s Information)

Jeremy

[Sean Oneil]

[JeremyG] “The Sonnet drives are connected through infiniband at the back of the drive itself, then they connect to SAS at the ATTO card.”

That’s actually just an Infiniband connector, commonly used for multilane SATA. Actual Infiniband is different.

[Jeremy Garchow]

How so? Just curious.

[Sean Oneil]

Multilane SATA just crams four SATA links down a single cable. The connector used for Infiniband happens to have the same amount of pins as four SATA cables do. So that is why SATA card makers are “stealing” Infiniband connectors and cables. An Infiniband cable can be used as a multilane SATA cable, since they’re both just point-to-point copper connections. But it’s still just four SATA linkl, not an Infiniband link.

Actual Infiniband is different. It’s a completely different protocol that has nothing to do with SATA or SAS. Infiniband has it’s own controller cards and switches. It’s more like ethernet, in the sense that it’s designed to network computers together. Not to connect computers directly to hard drives like SATA.

Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infiniband

Sean

[Jeremy Garchow]

Got ya, the more I thought about it, the more I started to understand. Thanks for the info.

I just wanted to be cool and say infiniband in a sentence.

[Sean Oneil]

Understandable. That’s what the cool kids are saying now.

Sean

[Jon Schilling]

Our CalDigit HDPro is a native PCI express storage which has no converter/bridge involved thus it reduces the delay and potential problem of conversion, which also means the HDPro has more reliable operation.

Jon Schilling | Account Manager
CalDigit Inc.
Storage Solutions that work for un-compressed SD & HD, Photography & Audio
http://www.caldigit.com
Tel: 714-572-9889 X234
Fax: 714-572-9881
e-mail: jons@caldigit.com
Skype me: cgijon
msn: mpujon

[Jon Schilling]

I almost forgot, for those of you who don’t know about our HDPro product, more info here: https://www.caldigit.com/HDPro.asp

Jon Schilling | Account Manager
CalDigit Inc.
Storage Solutions that work for un-compressed SD & HD, Photography & Audio
http://www.caldigit.com
Tel: 714-572-9889 X234
Fax: 714-572-9881
e-mail: jons@caldigit.com
Skype me: cgijon
msn: mpujon