Storage switch and router maker Brocade has started developing SAN solutions based on the sixth-generation Fibre Channel (FC) standard, which was officially announced on Tuesday by the FICA industry association. Fully backward compatible with the previous two releases, the specification doubles the throughput of Gen 5 FC to 32Gbps and can be configured to provide up to 128 Gbps or quadruple the throughput.

In addition to enabling higher data rates, the Gen 6 Fibre Channel includes the addition of forward error correction (FEC) that improves the reliability of links by facilitating automatic detection and recovery from bit errors. It also introduces a new stand-by mode for optical connectors that is activated multiple times each second to lower energy consumption.

“Fibre Channel remains a trusted and scalable architecture for storage networks. With the Gen 6 offerings, the FC industry is assuring that solutions will continue to be developed to keep up with the future requirements of customer data centers,” says Wikibon Senior Analyst Stu Miniman. “Since vendor development of FC tends to lead customer adoption, it is good to see advanced functionality and backwards compatibility mentioned as much as the new speeds.”

The standard marks a major milestone in the ongoing disruption of the network, which Brocade enterprise solutions boss Jason Nolet sees as the “next battleground, the next area of the data center where we can drive more efficiency and more flexibility in particular through virtualization.” In an interview on theCUBE, the executive remarked that the OpenFlow SDN protocol “unleashes the potential for innovation in the network infrastructure. Historically, that innovation has been entirely a function of network equipment vendors […] with the addition of OpenFlow, you now have two points of innovation.”

In conjunction with the announcement of support for Gen 6 FC, Brocade unveiled a new qualification service meant to help enterprise flash vendors ensure compatibility with its products. The Solid State Ready program offers “testing for proper operation across multiple fabrics, heterogeneous servers and host bus adapters,” according to the firm, and is designed for all solid state storage system providers.

Image source Brocade