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Showing posts from September, 2019

Fibre Channel research

The last couple of weeks I've been traveling for work, and I spent a long flight reading some publications I had saved up about mainframe and Fibre Channel. I will talk about some good sources of information later, but for now know that FICON runs over Fibre Channel, and indeed a lot of the reasons behind why Fibre Channel is known to be really reliable is that it more or less came out of IBMs requirements for accessing mainframe disk storage. Enterprise disk storage has this annoying issue that the disk arrays are: Heavy Power-hungry Ridiculously expensive An example: DS6800 is widely known to be an unreliable platform, and I would certainly never run a mainframe on it based on my experiences repairing mine. However it is as small as disk arrays get, but it is still 50 kg empty, and consumes 500W of power! However the DS6800 is kind of a black sheep in reliability. What if we look at something bigger and better? The big brother DS8000 is known to be rock solid fo