MyHootAirBalooon

Sorry, I don't understand "Wendell" and "level 1 content". When it comes to enterprise stuff, a lot of things are left unexplained. It was first when I started working with SAS and SCSI320 hardware while asking questions to people I started understanding the tech and the different ports (SFF-8087, SFF-8482, SFF-8643, SFF-8470, ........). For example how you terminate a parallel SCSI connector is never explained anywhere, but if you have the hardware you will know what works and what does not. So, once you start working with FibreChannel and experiment with different hardware, many questions will straighten themselves out. Building a smaller Beowulf cluster and benchmarking it with a few parallelized tasks over 40GbE vs FC (or whatever is comparable in terms of speed and cost) wouldn't be that hard to understand in more layman's terms and a few short explanations of what software implementations in use wouldn't be that difficult either and on par with LTT's level. The economical argument doesn't work here. I've watched a few clips of protagonists of FC and they argue that FC is cheaper than Ethernet because it is simpler. Fact is that Ethernet, when you go 10GbE and higher is NOT cheap. So it seems that FC and Ethernet are competitors in the enterprise market. Infiniband also seem to be such a competitor that is now owned by Oracle, so seems Thunderbolt. DisplayPort could theoretically be a competing technology. Note here that this is regarding FC vs Ethernet where both interfaces are available in copper form as well as fibre-optic form even though it is more common with fibre-optics for FC. Fibre optics indeed has advantages. Single-mode fibre optics is not that hard to work with unless we're talking MPO connectors or something. Multi-mode is said to be more forgiving but I'm a little skeptical to such statements. Ok so FC is it's own protocol. Let's say that I have 5 machines with Windows 7 installed on them, what software do I install to set them up to communicate with each other over this FC interface? What can I do with such an interface on a bunch of Windows machines? If I open the device manager on a Windows computer with FC interface, will it show up as an network interface controller, a hard drive controller or both or as something else?

I have a long series of questions that could be answered in a whole LinusTechTips episode: What is the purpose of Fibre Channel HBAs? Now you have generation 5 and generation 6 HBAs with speeds of 8/16/32 Gb/s transfer speeds using optical fiber for communication rather than copper wire. What is the purpose of FC today? They are marketed as for use with hard drives, but I see no INTERNAL connectors on them that would be suited for internal hard drives such as SAS or SATA connectors. So what is the purpose of them then? It looks like they are made for external communication only. But why use FC, why not use Ethernet, you have 1GbE, 10GbE, 40GbE, ... speeds for any taste and preference? Both wired and optical. So why would one use FC instead of high speed Ethernet? To be more frank, what protocols and drivers are involved with FC? Do you use TCP/IP or what is involved? When using the controller, will it just show other devices connected to it as PCI devices, or SCSI/SATA devices or what? Will it act as a hard drive controller or an Ethernet controller? What is the target hardware used for it, some special devices with FC, another computer with an FC HBA or a FC switch? If I were to build a Beowulf cluster spanning multiple computers, what would be the best way of implementing the usage of FC connections to connect the nodes in such a cluster? Are there any substantial benefits of using that instead of regular Ethernet? To tell the truth, why am I using all these four (five if we account for SATA) interfaces interchangeably? Is it expected to see these interfaces merge into one some day in the future? I guess then we should throw Thunderbolt into the mix and while we're at it why not HDMI and DP or ..... USB3?!? Even more confusing will it get when you have FibreChannel over Ethernet (FCoE)!!! Source information comes from Broadcom/LSI, Mellanox, etc... Glossary: HBA = Host Bus Adapter (used in distinction with "I/O controller" where the I/O controller mostly means the chip that handles the interface whereas an HBA is a complete solution involving the I/O chip, PCIe connector and other I/O connectors, i.e. a controller card). FC = Fibre Channel