Fourth Generation Storage Networking - One Decade of Fibre Channel

The Fibre Channel industry is on the verge of another milestone, the move to 4 Gb/s speeds in time to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the adoption of the original FC standard. Fibre Channel fabric, regardless of speed, is not a universal solution to storage connectivity. In deciding between Fibre Channel and iSCSI the difference in performance becomes profound if one is comparing 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel to Gb/s iSCSI or 1 Gb/s IP connections to NAS devices. However when 10 Gb/s Ethernet becomes less expensive and more broadly distributed, then deciding between 10 Gb/s iSCSI, 10 Gb/s NAS over IP and 10 Gb/s Fibre Channel becomes quite complicated.