SAN FRANCISCO, June 5, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE) -- The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) today announced the approval of the FC-SATA (Fibre Channel - Serial Advanced Technology Advancement) by the ANSI T11 Technical Committee, providing storage system OEMs with a new option to consider when creating tiered storage.
FC-SATA is designed to complement the cost-effective Fibre Channel initiative endorsed in 2004 by the FCIA. By offering the FC-SATA option, IT professionals have the ability to intermix cost-effective SATA or high performance Fibre Channel disk drives in their tiered storage infrastructure depending on their application needs.
"Fibre Channel is the most widely deployed, field-proven external storage system protocol," said Skip Jones, Chairman FCIA. "Through advancements in tiered storage architectures like FC-SATA, which span the full-spectrum from low-end to enterprise, Fibre Channel will continue to protect and future-proof your storage system investments."
FC-SATA is a protocol extension utilizing the standard, fast and reliable Fibre Channel transport. The protocol extension operates in both point-to-point and arbitrated loop (FC-AL) environments. A significant benefit of FC-SATA is that vendors with existing Fibre Channel environments can now deploy cost-effective tiered storage within their enterprise storage system infrastructures by natively connecting near-line ready Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives.
FC-SATA technology was first announced in June of 2005, and was officially approved at that time by the ANSI INCITS T11 committee for technical standards development. Completion of the FC-SATA standard delivers upon the Fibre Channel industry's commitment to make the performance and reliability of Fibre Channel available to the cost-sensitive small and medium business (SMB) market and to extend Fibre Channel beyond the enterprise.
About FCIA
The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) is a non-profit international organization whose sole purpose is to act as the independent technology and marketing voice of the Fibre Channel industry. We are committed to helping member organizations promote and position Fibre Channel, and to providing a focal point for Fibre Channel information, standards advocacy, and education.
FCIA members include manufacturers, system integrators, developers, vendors, industry professionals, and end users. Our member-led working groups and committees focus on creating and championing the Fibre Channel technology roadmaps, targeting applications that include data storage, video, networking, and storage area network (SAN) management. For more info, go to http://www.fibrechannel.org