Fibre Channel Storage
The Storage Area Network was developed to flexibly manage and use the required data storage. A more efficient and flexible use of storage capacity is possible here than with dedicated data storage directly operated at the servers.
As opposed to NAS or iSCSI, FC-SAN is formed over a separate fibre glass infrastructure. The system utilized in this process is called Fibre Channel. A simple Storage Area Network consists of a Fibre Channel Switch, one or more disk sub-systems and the servers that are connected over so-called Host Bus Adapters - HBAs in short - to the Fibre Channel Switch. Storage Area Networks today work with bandwidths in the range of 1 GBit/s to 8 GBit/s. Since they use a protocol specifically adapted to the requirements of mass storage use and the data lines are insensitive to electrical interferences, FC can implement very high transfer rates. Added to this is the Multi-Pathing concept which is being consequently pursued in the Storage Area Network. If it is possible for a server to reach a storage unit over several Host Bus Adapters the data transfer between both systems is distributed to all available data paths.

	ICEBOX® FQS	SAN-Switches	Host-Bus-Adapter (HBAs)
Chassis	4U Rack	QLOGIC 1UE Rack	1-, 2- or 4 channels
Internal Storage
Max. grass capacity (TByte	24 or 48
Number of 3,5" devices	8 or 16
Device type	SATA and SAS
Hardware redundance - Hot Swap	Harddisks, power supplies & fans
RAID-Level	0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50, 60, JBOD
External ports	2x FC (4GB) Host &.SAS ext.Port
Extensibility	optional SAS JBODs
Additional features	analog relais interface
Support-Services	2 years Bring-In-service
Datasheet
Product video (german language)
Case study