[volunteers] Current list of Speakers - June through October 2011

[Luke S Crawford]

Mehma Sarja <mehmasarja at gmail.com> writes:

> On 5/5/11 10:21 PM, Jesse Monroy wrote:
> > I don't see a significant difference between the two technologies. As
> > such, I would be happy
> >
> Huge differences. Got presentations from IBM and HDS a couple of years
> back. IBM, and at that time Sun were reselling LSI boxes with their
> own, differing, management software and firmware. HDS, for example,
> controls the firmware on each drive itself. How they cache indexes of
> what data is on what drive - is different from an AOE array and
> different among competing FC products.  Netapp or EMC, forget which,
> uses Windows as it's management software OS - prone to viruses, others
> don't.

> I see what you are saying about the technologies being the same. In a
> sense that's true at the drive level and at the optical switch level
> and at the HBA level. 

the drives are quite different.  fibre channel drives are 15-pin SCA
(old paralel scsi was 80 pin SCA... fibre channel connectors look
similar, only shorter)   The HBAs and switches are also quite 
different.  I've gotten rid of my fibre channel chassis and my 
silkworm switches, but I still have a bunch of pci-X  HSSDC
fibre channel HBAs if someone wants them.   The're old;  1 gigabit
speeed, so they are worth about what I'm asking for them;  nothing.  

I soppose you could hook fibre channel drives up to a computer, then
have that computer export them using ata over ethernet, but that's not
usually how it's done. 

(I've also seen chassis that use sata drives internally and export
externally via fibre channel, but that's not usually how it's done
there is a specific 'fibre channel' dirve interface that is specified 
at the same level as sata, sas or scsi)