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Beyond SCSI: Fibre Channel for Audio/Visual Applications

Seven JPG photos of this meeting at Vixel.

Written by Gary Louie, AES PNW Secretary

With Tom Clark, Director of Technical Marketing, Vixel Corp.
February 17, 1999 at Vixel Corp, Bothell, WA

February's PNW meeting dealt little with audio itself, but with a technology that will affect those that manipulate digital media: storage area networking at high speed. Some 28 AES attendees gathered at Vixel headquarters in Bothell, WA.

PNW Vice Chair Aurika Hays (substituting for the absent Chair Rick Chinn) had all attendees introduce themselves. PNW Committee member, meeting organizer, and Vixel test engineer Vince Dayton introduced Tom Clark, Director of Technical Marketing for Vixel Corp.

The enormous storage requirements for digital media have sparked a different model for storing and serving the huge files at practical speeds. Users now familiar with PCs with their individual parallel SCSI (small computer system interface) storage, and 10 megabit/sec ethernet networking know the limitations of their systems when it comes to handling and sharing digital audio or video. The actual storage retrieval and sharing is too slow, especially for multiple users and full frame, full speed video.

A practical way to handle such data among multiple users in a networked environment is to have a very high speed network with a similarly fast, optimized data storage serving system, known as a SAN (storage area network). Many servers then use a common storage (hard disks) area. 100 megabyte/sec performance is achieved, which can be called "Gigabit" products.

Physical components appear familiar, yet use copper or fiber optics for high speed networking. Host Bus Adapters and GBICs (gigabit interface converters) are networking cards for PCs, and GBIC hubs resemble ordinary ethernet hubs.

The spelling "fibre" was used in the fibre channel name to not preclude the use of copper wire in such products. Therefore, it is not "fiber" channel as in fiber optic. Hundreds of thousands of such products have been shipped on PCs such as Sun and Compaq. Examples of applications were shown, such as a football video training installation, pre- press image handling for commercial printing, and server clustering for mission critical networks.

The traditional PNW door prize drawing awarded some Vixel shirts, and everyone received a Vixel keychain quarter puzzle, which was a hit. Just how do you get the quarter out?
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Last Modified 11/4/2001