NEWZ: Fibre Channel To Gain SATA Compatibility

[Explorer]

One would have to suspect that the Fibre Channel crowd has seen the writing on the wall (so to speak) about the long-term viability of Fibre Channel as an "inside-the-box" local connectivity medium, being that Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) controllers can use any mix of SAS and SATA storage devices natively -- with compatibility at the physical level and at the communications protocol level.

Being that FATA is apparently a proprietary protocol (HP, Seagate, and pals), one would have to surmise that this is an effort to promote an open standard.

• [list:d5261e95a3] Fibre Channel Industry Association Supports Development of SATA Tunneling Technology
  
  The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) today announced its support to develop a standard method for connecting Serial ATA (SATA) disk drives in storage systems using embedded Fibre Channel technology. The ANSI T11 Technical Committee has initiated work to develop a standard called FC-SATA. FC-SATA will leverage existing field-proven Fibre Channel infrastructures to enable cost-effective connections to low-cost SATA drives to both enterprise and smaller business computing systems.

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http://www.fibrechannel.org/NEWS/fcia050627.html

 

[Buck]

Being that FATA is apparently a proprietary protocol (HP, Seagate, and pals), one would have to surmise that this is an effort to promote an open standard.

Possibly, and if it is, I'm sure it's purely out of necessity.

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

The so-called FATA drives are meant for "legacy" (i.e. -- existing) Fibre Channel, though, they will work just fine with the newfangled "SATA tunneling" Fibre Channel once it arrives.

The SATA-capable Fibre Channel protocol will be able to communicate with SATA drives just like SAS can presently communicate with SATA drives (also using tunneling /encapsulation techniques). So, at some point in time, you'll have Fibre Channel host bus adapters processing SATA commands for SATA targets.

I still haven't heard anything definitive about the incorporation of the SATA (and eSATA) copper connector into the F-C specification. I suspect that they will instead settle on special hubs and switches that have SATA ports and F-C optical uplink modules to allow interfacing with F-C.

If you only knew how arrogant and conceited some of these F-C jackasses are, I suspect there were members of the F-C community that began gagging a few weeks ago with this "SATA announcement" (about the same time Macaholics began gagging over the migration to Intel X86).