The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announced today that it successfully completed its recent large group test period.
FCIA said various member organizations collaborated to demonstrate the ability of Fibre Channel to support multiple protocols and integrate Fibre Channel with general-purpose Ethernet networks. This open industry sponsored “Plugfest” was attended by 16 hardware and software companies. The purpose of this event was to demonstrate Fibre Channel as a complete multi-protocol network infrastructure, as well as support everyday business network applications such as streaming media, Internet access, and Ethernet LAN printing-directly from a Fibre Channel fabric.
The following multi-vendor networking capabilities were demonstrated: streaming video; accessing the public Internet by Fibre Channel attached computer platforms (while seamlessly integrating with Gigabit Ethernet); Storage Area Network/Local Area Network (SAN/LAN) printing; and creating a multi-switch fabric to deliver a SAN configuration for both disk and tape applications.
Representatives from the following companies participated in this event:
Agilent Technologies
Brocade Communications
Finisar
Gadzoox
HP
Hitachi Data systems
I-tech
IBM
INRANGE Technology
www.mcdata.com
Mylex
Qlogic
RaidTec
SANcastle
Seagate
University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab
Vixel Corp
FCIA said the next FCIA-sponsored Plugfest is scheduled for July 15th. The focus of this event will be extending 1-2 Gigabit interoperability across the fabric and remote back-up across Fibre Channel and the LAN. .
