On Fri, 27 May 2005, Ken Fuchs wrote: > On Thu, 26 May 2005, Florin Iucha wrote: >> Do you have any links/references/howto on using Fiber Channel? I was >> interested in the same thing, but I did not find any good references. > > Rather than using Fibre Channel (FC), one might consider ATA/SATA over > Ethernet (AoE). There's a good article on AoE in the June issue of > Linux Magazine. There's also a less technical article on AoE in the > June issue of Linux Journal. First off, both of these statements are true: SCSI is dying, and SCSI is taking over. SCSI the hardware/electrical specification is dying, being eaten on the low end by the increasing sophistication of ATAPI/SATA drives, and on the high end by the decreasing cost and complexity of FC. On the other hand, SCSI the protocol is taking over. ATA is basically SCSI-over-IDE, and 99.999+% of the traffic going over all fibre channels is SCSI protocol. I have some reservations about iSCSI (SCSI over TCP/IP), especially when it's sold as ATA over TCP/IP. First of all, it sounds exactly like a standard invented by the marketing department to make managers feel good. They understand ATA, they understand TCP/IP- two great tastes that don't make you gag together! The other problem is that TCP/IP is not a reliable protocol, FC is. Ethernet also doesn't deal well with multiple devices trying to saturate a single link. What this means is that it'll work- right up until the point it doesn't... Brian