Interlab - Lightworks....

As part of the hardware components apart of the RAID Array we have a list of peripherals each must be matched and carefully tested. We quaffed QLogic, Atto and Vixel products and for consistency reason, we try to stick to them. It makes support more consistent and responsive.

As first part we have the HBA adapter card, fitting into the Editing machine or the Server, it is a PCI card, we chose LC fiber optics connections as standard, the reason is simple It is electromagnetic noise safe, we do not care about cable length, we do not add additional hardware like Copper/Fiber Optics transceivers and we carry one stock of GBIC. However we can interface to most fibber third party installation in 1 or 2Gb/s devices.

Fiber Channel topology is similar to Ethernet, where hubs and switches are routing data, by opposition to SCSI daisy chained.

In FC we can connect one or two hosts to a RAID but we can not connect Two Raid chassis to a single HBA unless it is a dual channel. To deal with this we use Fibber channel switches 8 or 12 ports, we can mix GBIC in 2Gb/s with 1Gb/s regardless on connection type optic LC,SC or copper... The switch will manage the traffic to meet each connected device requirements.

Note that Fiber channel software management requires a parallel Ethernet network to move Metadatas between hosts.

Interconnections drawing