Server links to hit 10Gbits/sec

High-speed server links will hit 10Gbits/sec over distances of up to 10Km using a new fibre channel standard designed to meet the needs of broadband data delivery.

Efficiency is also increased, so that real data rates will be 12 times those on nominally 1Gbit fibre channel connections, Fibre Channel Industry Association chairman Skip Jones told a London conference.

The 10GFC standard has yet to be endorsed by the ANSI standards body but the details have been agreed by the guiding T11 committee, he said. Products should be available by 2002.

10GFC shares architectural features and components with ethernet and InfiniBand, both of which have been touted as potential rivals.

But Kumar Malavalli, chairman of the T11 committee, said that ethernet cannot match fibre channel for error detection and recovery, efficient large-block data transfers, and support of upper-level protocols like SCSI, audio-video fast file transfer, and Intelligent Peripheral Interface.

FCIA founder Ed Frymoyer questioned the need for InfiniBand, which he described as an Intel technology designed to replace the PCI bus in super-fast servers but which extends beyond the PC.

He said that servers did need to replace PCI internally but he could see no point in having a new architecture externally. "Is this for the benefit of the user, or for the benefit of Intel?" he asked.

Intel has also been criticised for introducing USB 2.0 and Serial ATA buses for tasks covered by the existing 1394 FireWire bus.