By Jason Stamper
Two key networking and storage connectivity organizations, the Fibre Channel Association (FCA) and the Fibre Channel Loop Community (FCLC) have agreed to merge, Computerwire has learned. The combined organization will apparently be renamed the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA). Both are non-profit organizations, and in the past have had their share of disagreements. It’s no secret that the two organizations have not always seen eye to eye, an FCA executive close to the deal told Computerwire, but this is something that the members of the two groups have been asking for for some time. It can only benefit the members.
An unofficial board meeting is to take place next week – unofficial because by that time the two organizations will not legally be merged – to discuss the immediate direction of the FCIA. The official launch of the FCIA is not expected to happen until mid-August. The former FCA claimed 150 members, and says its main focus has been on nurturing and helping to develop a broad market for all fibre channel products.
The FCLC meanwhile has concentrated on Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) technology promotion, providing marketing support, exhibits, and trade shows for system integrators, peripheral manufacturers, software developers, component manufacturers and the like. It claims over 100 members. The FCLC’s take has been that FC-AL is the foundation upon which broader implementation of fibre channel interconnect schemes would be achieved. But fibre itself supports multiple topologies of which FC-AL is just one: it also supports point-to-point and switching. FC-AL supports a maximum of 127 active nodes at any one time due to addressing limitations, whereas in a switched fibre channel architecture multiple FC-AL loops can be linked together.
Fibre Channel itself is a fast serial bus interface standard intended to replace Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) on high-end servers and storage devices. It offers higher speed, the base speed being 100Mbps, and many devices are dual ported (they can be accessed through two independent ports, which doubles speed and increases fault tolerance). Cables can be as long as 10km over optical cables or 30m over copper – fibre channel was originally designed to support fiber optic cabling only. When support for copper was added to the standard some years ago an International Standards Organization (ISO) task force changed the spelling from ‘Fiber Channel’ to ‘Fibre Channel’. Fibre also offers support for SCSI.
