Evaluation of a data communication model for switched fibre channel

ANSI standard Fibre Channel is emerging as the networking protocol of choice for high bandwidth applications. Fibre Channel is an enabling technology because of the tremendous advantages in speed and latency it provides over existing networking technologies. Applications which weren´t feasible before are now possible and more will follow which demand this performance. Fibre Channel is the high performance alternative to existing networking technologies such as FDDI, Fast Ethernet, and ATM. Fibre Channel (FC) provides for 2 different data communication models, connection and connectionless. Although interoperable, some of these implementations may not result in optimal performance. For example, applications for disk attach typically use FC class 2 with large frame sizes for data transfer. Client/server applications in imaging are using large class 1 frames. There is some disagreement in the FC community as to which is more appropriate. Both have their advantages and disadvantages and so its necessary to look at each application individually. This paper addresses some of these issues by simulating these 2 communication models over different switch architectures