RE: Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet Routers?

[Black_David@emc.com]

Questions about available and planned products are generally not
appropriate for this list.  This is an IETF working group engaged
in development of protocol standards and related documents.
Beyond that I suspect that you've misunderstood the FAQs that
you've read on Fibre Channel, and this list is not an
appropriate forum for a tutorial on that topic.

--David (WG co-chair) 

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Carl Hirsch [SMTP:Carl.Hirsch@computershare.com]
> Sent:	Wednesday, November 22, 2000 2:48 PM
> To:	ips@ece.cmu.edu
> Subject:	Fibre Channel-to-Ethernet Routers?
> 
> 	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