Storage Area Networks (SANs)

The explosion in demand for storage capacity in the last decade demanded a new generation of high speed, highly flexible and most of all reliable storage networks solution.

Storage Area Networks running Fibre Channel protocol over fiberoptics represent an ideal solution for a highly reliable, high speed connection between servers and data storage.
 
Disaster recovery requirements increased the demand for longer reach solutions between data centers and the remote storage of valuable data.
In addition to the increase of storage requirements due to new web applications, video services, IPTV, stricter regulations in the financial sector, especially the Sarbanes-Oxley-Act (SOX) are driving up the need for storage and backup capacity. Most recently the wide introduction of HDTV more than doubled storage requirements of TV stations’ datacenters.
 
The Fibre Channel (FC) standard has doubled its transmission speed per port every2-3 years to now 8.5Gb/s.The Small Form Factor Pluggable (SFP) transceiver standard allows storage switch vendors a high capacity of data transmission with small space and power requirements. Storage Switch vendors as well as Host Bus Adapter (HBA) manufacturers recently released 8GFC products. Optical transceivers as well as systems are multirate 8GFC/4GFC/2GFC and offer therefore higher flexibility and backward compatibility.
 
The introduction of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) enhances the reach of Fibre Channel as a solution for storage into any existing 10Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) network or datacenter.
 
Opnext’s strengths in high speed optical transceiver technology and Storage Networks’ requirements are converging with the introduction of 8GFC and FCoE. Opnext has introduced a full line of SFP+ products for support of its switch and OEM customers.