Silkworn puts Fibre Channels in a spin

Analysts are already predicting the end of the era dominated by Fibre Channel in Storage Area Networks (SANs).

Paul Trowbridge, marketing director EMEA at Brocade, predicts that over the next one or two years Fibre Channel architecture will continue to prevail as SAN technology. Trowbridge said: "We already produce SAN-to-SAN connections via an IP backbone."

However, storage insiders speculate that Brocade has given the Ethernet-based storage world an enormous push with its announcement.

The high-end solution, Silkworm 12000 available from autumn 2001 will be the second machine after the Slingshot 4218 from Brocade's competitor Gadzoox to break through the 2-Gb/s barrier for fabric switches.

In addition it will integrate the reworked operating system belonging to the manufacturer, Fabric-OS, now Secure Fabric-OS; whose security features include access control lists and the authentication of switches amongst themselves.

By Simone Schnell