Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet Routers?

[Carl Hirsch <Carl.Hirsch@computershare.com>]

	Hello. I'm new to this list, so I apologize if this is a standard
newbie question. 

	Is anybody aware of the existence of an available or soon-to-be
available Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet router. I won't bombard you folks with
the details, but the company for which I do network design is looking for a
solution to extend a VMS cluster's Fibre Channel SAN fifty miles to a
disaster recovery site we're building. The current, and exorbitantly
expensive, solution is to purchase two strands of dark fibre and to light it
up with equipment which supports fibre channel such as Luxn's Dense WDM
modules. 

	A much cheaper solution would be to use a Gigabit Ethernet pipe
provided by Ameritech. Cheaper by more than a factor of 10, in fact. The
only problem is that this GigaMAN service supports Ethernet and Ethernet
only. So my aim is to get the Fibre Channel traffic riding on that Ethernet
pipe. 

	From the investigation I've done, it appears while several
manufacturers have announced Fibre-Channel-to-Ethernet
routers/gateways/media converters (Gadzoox, Crossroads, Entrada, etc.), they
are all talking about shipping 1st Quarter 2001. I'm not going to put much
stock in these claims as product ship dates have a habit of creeping. 

	If there's no currently available embedded solution, I suppose there
is another route. Many of the FAQ's I've read on Fibre Channel say that you
can slap a FC and a Gigabit Ethernet NIC both into a workstation and route
between the two interfaces. Has anyone on this list tried such a setup? I'd
be curious about the latency added by handling such routing in software
rather than through an ASIC. What OS is capable of routing Fibre Channel
Over IP between two such interfaces?

	thanks for any help you might be able to provide,
	-carl hirsch
	network engineer
	computershare investor services