Fibre Channel Switch
SAN Recovery - Fibre Channel Switch
A Fibre Channel (FC) switch refers to a network switch compatible with Fibre Channel protocol. A Fibre Channel director is a switch with at least 128 ports. It is similar to switch in core FC protocol functionality.
Fibre Channel switch allows the creation of Fibre Channel fabric, a network of Fibre Channel devices which allows many-to-many communication, device name lookup, security and redundancy. Fibre Channel fabric is one of the important components of storage area networks (SAN).
Fibre Channel switches also implement zoning, a mechanism that disables unwanted traffic between certain fabric nodes.
Fibre Channel switches may be deployed one at a time or in larger multi-switch configurations. New switches can be added as the storage needs of the company grow. These switches are connected together via fiber optic cable using the standard device ports.
Some of these switches are available with dedicated high-speed stacking ports to handle inter-switch connections and allow high-performance multi-switch configurations to be created using fewer switches overall. In this aspect, they resemble stackable Ethernet switches.
Important manufacturers of Fibre Channel switches are: Brocade, Cisco Systems, and QLogic. Of late, Brocade has introduced 8 Gb/sec Brocade switches, which scales from 8 to 24 ports. Important applications include DAS-to-SAN migration, server/storage consolidation, and virtualized server connectivity.
