SAN FRANCISCO, June 27, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) today announced its support to develop a standard method for connecting Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives in storage systems using embedded Fibre Channel technology. The ANSI T11 Technical Committee has initiated work to develop a standard called FC-SATA. FC-SATA will leverage existing field-proven Fibre Channel infrastructures to enable cost-effective connections to low-cost SATA drives to both enterprise and smaller business computing systems.
FC-SATA is designed to complement the low-cost native Fibre Channel initiative endorsed last year by the FCIA. By offering the FC-SATA option, IT professionals can now choose between low-cost native Fibre Channel or FC-SATA in their tiered storage infrastructure depending on their application needs.
Historically, Fibre Channel to SATA connections required additional chip-based bridging products to facilitate communication with SATA drives in a Fibre Channel environment. By incorporating "SATA Tunneling over Fibre Channel" technology into the Fibre Channel I/O controller chips, the requirement for costly bridging products or migration to new, unproven alternative solutions is completely eliminated.
"The development of this standard could drastically lower the cost of storage systems while leveraging existing Fibre Channel investments," said Werner Glinka, Chairman of the FCIA. "This is accomplished by allowing connectivity to SATA drives, and thus permitting tiered storage solutions based on Fibre Channel that maximizes investments."
FC-SATA, together with other technologies being developed through the T11 Technical Committees, continue a commitment to make the performance and reliability of Fibre Channel available to the cost-sensitive small and medium business (SMB) market and extend Fibre Channel beyond the enterprise.
"More and more of our customers are looking to capitalize fully on their Fibre Channel storage system investments," said Mike Smith, executive vice president of worldwide marketing at Emulex. "We initially proposed the FC-SATA standard because it allows companies to leverage their vast existing investments in field-proven Fibre Channel technology through a tiered-storage solution."
"Seagate supports the standard as it will ultimately provide more flexible tiered storage options for the enterprise," said Jeff Loebbaka, vice president of Global Marketing at Seagate Technology. "Seagate is ready, and offers its NL35 series of low-cost-per gigabyte drives in both Fibre Channel and SATA that can effectively address the needs of any enterprise interested in adding nearline to their data centers."
"The addition of FC-SATA to the Fibre Channel protocol offers both users and solution providers a cost-effective migration path to implementing tiered storage capabilities while preserving the infrastructure and storage assets they've already invested in," said Erik Ottem, director of marketing for the Input/Output Solutions Division in Agilent Technologies' Semiconductor Products Group. "Tiered storage is clearly important to the community, and Agilent believes that the FCIA's proactive movement on this proposal helps to solidify a strategy that makes sense on many fronts."
"FC-SATA will significantly enhance the practice of building tiered storage architectures for enterprises," said Jay Kidd, Chief Technology Officer for Brocade Communications Systems. "By simplifying the integration of FC and SATA drives within an array and a fabric, FC-SATA will extend the value of switched Fibre Channel infrastructure and enable one of the fundamental promises of ILM -- transparent access to a wide range of storage price/performance alternatives."
"McDATA supports the FC-SATA initiative," said Bob Williamsen, McDATA's senior director of strategic marketing and FCIA board member. "The FC-SATA standard will allow smaller customers to gain the benefits realized with McDATA's Global Enterprise Data Infrastructure strategy for deploying tiered storage infrastructures, which leverages less expensive storage support where appropriate, to reduce costs and increase infrastructure flexibility."
About FCIA
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a nonprofit international organization of manufacturers, systems integrators, developers, systems vendors, industry professionals and end users. With 80 member companies and FCIA affiliates in the United States and Japan, FCIA is committed to delivering a broad base of Fibre Channel infrastructure to support a wide array of industry applications within the mass storage and IT-based arenas. FCIA working groups focus on specific aspects of the technology, targeting both vertical and horizontal markets including storage, video, networking and SAN management. For more information on FCIA, please visit our web site: http://www.fibrechannel.org, contact us: info@fibrechannel.org or call 1-415-561-6270.