Farther and Faster at the Speed of Light

by Scott Kipp oemagazine, October 2005 As disk-drive interfaces increased in speed during the 1990s, the distance limitations of the parallel small-computer-systems interface (SCSI) bus became apparent. Each time the speed of the SCSI bus increased, the supported distance decreased because of the limitations of the copper cabling. To overcome these distance limitations and offer a networked architecture, the American National Standards Institute decided to define Fibre Channel and, thus, storage-area networks. The Fibre Channel name implies the use of optic fiber to interconnect storage devices and servers via channels (high-bandwidth connections). Read more