ery large "farms" of storage devices, which could potentially consist of dozens or even hundreds of servers and devices. The Fibre Channel was developed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in the early 1990s as a means to transfer very large amounts of data quickly. Fibre Channel is compatible with other legacy technologies such as SCSI, IP, IEEE 802.2, AAL, and Link Encapsulation. It can also be used over copper cabling or fiber-optic cable. Fibre Channel links usually offer a performance from 266 Mbps to over 4 Gbps. Devices can be distanced up to about 10 kilometers (6 miles), which 32. http://www.fibrechannel.com-the web site of the Fibre Channel Industry Association with tutorials, FAQs on the technology, and information on how it relates to SANs. Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY offers the possibility of convenient off-site connectivity for network managers. Fibre Channel sup- ports several configurations, including point-to-point and switched topologies. A Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) is usually used to create a reliable and high-speed environment where any- to-any connectivity is easily supported and where even simpler SCSI devices can be easily bridged onto and interfaced with a Fibre Channel. The special functionality of the underlying sophisticated hardware, which must be able to iden- tify, process, switch, and forward all transmitted packets quickly, is not found in ordinary CPUs; there- fore, special architecture semiconductor chips are required that are classified among the greater family of network processors. We will examine these microchips in greater detail later in this book. THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS Because of deregulation in the telecommunications indust