The Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) announces what it claims is the fastest networking protocol-- Gen 6 Fibre Channel, delivering up to 128Gbps to SANs, as well as reliability, efficiency and simplicity enhancements.
Set for a 2016 release, Gen 6 fibre channel enables 64Gbps full-duplex speeds as well as a 128Gbps throughput option to deliver full-duplex speeds of 256Gbps, all with seamless inter- and backward-compatibility to 16 and 8Gbps fibre channel networks.
In addition the Gen 6 standard features Forward Error Correction (FEC), lower energy consumptions (via optical connectors operating in "nap" mode multiple times per second) and automatic configuration to fastest supported speeds between any two network points.
"Enterprises and service providers can look forward to new innovations from the community of compute, network and storage vendors that will develop next-generation solutions in 2016 based on the Gen 6 standard in order to leverage its advanced feature set," the FCIA says.
The first Gen 6 fibre channel products should be available from Brocade and QLogic by 2016.
