1
ATTO Technology FibreBridge 4500 Installation and Operation Manual
1 Fibre Channel is a key technology for storage
Fibre Channel is a serial communications technology designed to transfer large amounts of data
between a variety of hardware systems over long distances. It is a key technology for applications that
require shared, high bandwidth access to storage.
Fibre Channel provides a logical point-to-point
serial channel for the transfer of data between a
buffer at a source device and a buffer at a
destination device. It moves buffer contents from
one port to another, without regard to the format
or meaning of the data, so different upper level
protocols are able to run over Fibre Channel
hardware.
The Fibre Channel architecture is structured as a
hierarchical set of protocol layers. Defined within
these layers are rules for signal interfaces, serial
encoding and decoding, error control, frame
format and communications protocols.
All ATTO FibreBridge
TM
models can be used in a
SAN (Storage Area Network) to connect a variety
of Fibre Channel and SCSI devices to meet your
needs.
A SAN is a shared storage architecture connecting
computers and storage devices for online data
access. Each connected system can directly access
any attached storage device. Storage devices
could include RAID, tape backup, tape library,
CD-ROM library, standalone disk drives or
JBOD.
SANs maintain greater fault tolerance and load
balancing by supporting server clustering and
failover (the ability for one server to take over for
another in the event of a failure).
ATTO FibreBridge models provide the interface
between SCSI and Fibre Channel resources in
SANs. Possible configurations depend upon your
current hardware and what you need to do.
Glossary
Some terms used in the Fibre Channel industry are defined below. More information is available through
the Fibre Channel Industry Association
(www.fibrechannel.com)
, the Storage Area Networking Industry
Association
(www.snia.org)
and the Fibre Channel Consortium
(www.iol.unh.edu)
.
Term
Definition
fabric
A Fibre Channel switch or two or more Fibre Channel switches interconnected to
physically transmit data between any two N_Ports on a switch or switches.
failover
The substitution of a working system for one which has failed.
FC-AL
Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop: A Fibre Channel network in which up to 126
systems and devices are connected in a loop topology, with each transmitter
connecting to the receiver of the device to its logical right. The Fibre Channel
Arbitrated Loop protocol used for transmission is different from Fibre Channel
switched and point to point protocols. Multiple FC-AL loops can be connected via
a fabric switch to extend the network.
firmware
Software stored in read-only memory (ROM) or programmable ROM (PROM).
Firmware is often responsible for the behavior of a system when it is first switched
on.
