Fiber Optical Cabling

Type of SAN

Fibre Channel SAN (FC-SAN)

Ethernet SAN (E-SAN

InfiniBand SAN (IBA-SAN)

Current Generation Bandwidth

100MBps Fibre Channel

200MBps Fibre Channel

400MBps Fibre Channel

Gigabit Ethernet

To be released in phases starting in 2002

1 – Replacement for PCI bus

2 – Used for server clustering interconnections

3 - SANs

Next Generation Bandwidth

1GBps Fibre Channel

10 Gigabit Ethernet

2.5GBps (1X)

10GBps (4X)

30GBps (12X)

Switch Types

Fibre Channel

Ethernet

InfiniBand

Distance Supported

10 Kilometers

Virtually unlimited distance via WAN technologies

1000m per link

This table was taken from CDW Data Storage Reference Guide (Flyer 10597), Page 51 – published Fall 2003