FCIA Completes 16Gb FC Standard, Supported by Brocade …

The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced the completion of the 16GFC standard which passed a final milestone within the ANSI T11 Technical Committee. With the approved 16GFC standard, the Fibre Channel industry continues to help customers preserve their 4GFC and 8GFC infrastructure investments and avoid costly ‘forklift’ replacements.

                                         Fibre Channel Speed Roadmap

The vote supports the ANSI INCITS T11 Technical Committee development of the 16GFC electrical copper and optical interfaces in its FC-PI-5 standard and ensures that Fibre Channel continues to provide the highest performance available for storage interconnects.

With 16GFC, users will experience twice the bandwidth of 8GFC – doubling savings in price/performance, power and port density. 16GFC is estimated to decrease power consumption by at least 25% over 8GFC technology. Transparently, without user intervention, 16GFC is auto-negotiated backward compatibly to 8GFC and 4GFC, ensuring that the user need not make a forklift remove and replace of their 4GFC or 8GFC Fibre Channel SAN to integrate individual 16GFC products at the pace of their own choosing. 16GFC provides a natural value migration from 8GFC and ensures the end user full confidence that 8GFC purchases made today are preserved investments for tomorrow. In addition, 16GFC reduces the number of links required to transfer large amounts of bandwidth in SANs while improving management capabilities by reducing the number of cables, ports and devices required to accomplish the same job.

"Protecting investments is a key element of technology planning for both IT manufacturers and their customers, as it allows them to make better decisions about current and future technologies," said Skip Jones, FCIA Chairman. "With 16GFC, Fibre Channel’s future is ensured by meeting today’s and future performance demands while preserving ongoing investments that users make in the technology. 16GFC provides all the benefits of full backward compatibility to the large, rapidly growing Fibre Channel installed base and will deliver the most cost-effective, highest performance for today’s demanding SAN applications."

16GFC user benefits:

• About 40% faster than 10G Ethernet SANs
• 2x faster than 8GFC
• Improved price/performance
• Lower power
• Backward compatibility
• Flexible configurability
• 60% to 2X improved SAN IO density
• 60% to 2X increased number of Virtual Machine IO channels per port
• Saves PCIe slots for other uses

FCIA member companies are building products based on 16GFC technology and will be available in the market in 2011.