Fibre Channel is being developed to resolve fundamental problems inherent to channel technologies, and as a result, extend the benefits of channel technology into the local area network. Fibre Channel technology addresses the distance limitations of conventional HiPPI and other channel technologies and the address space limitations of these technologies. Fibre Channel has scalable bandwidth/media options that permits the use of shielded twisted pair for 133 megabit-per-second links and multi-gigabit-per-second rates over fiber optic links for distances of up to ten kilometers. Fibre Channel has the capability of carrying both channel and network protocols simultaneously on the same media, by encapsulating IP signals in a manner illustrated in figure 4. Lastly, Fibre Channel uses 24 bit wide addresses so that over 16 million nodes can be included on a network.
Those computer vendors that are providing backing for Fibre Channel are:
Fibre Channel appears to be a technology designed specifically to overcome the shortfalls of conventional HiPPI. Meanwhile, the HiPPI standards are being expanded in an attempt to compete with Fibre Channel technology. Serial HiPPI has been developed to provide similar gigabit-per-second throughput over long distances (10 kilometers) over fiber. HiPPI can encapsulate data from TCP/IP applications, and HiPPI has the capability to double the address space to match the 24 bit addresses of Fibre Channel. As the supercomputing industry readjusts to the end of the Cold War and reduced government spending for research, it will be interesting to see if both Fibre Channel and (serial) HiPPI can survive.