SBIR-STTR Award

Fibre Channel has gained market momentum not only in the commercial storage industry but also in avionics applications. For instance, Fibre Channel is being used on a number of avionics weapon systems upgrades. Of the viable, available commercial standards that can be used today or will be implemented in the reasonable future, Fibre Channel is the best fit for both DoD and commercial real-time, fault-tolerant, high-availability systems. Current Fibre Channel switch vendors have not effectively addressed these needs. To meet this market, we propose a Fibre Channel switch which will simultaneously support switching both a comprehensive set of physical layer classes of service and the logical protocol layer called Virtual Interface Architecture. We will first build a model of our switch. We then will enumerate various configurations of the switch which potentially will meet our design goal. With the model, we will evaluate which configuration is best. We will then translate the best configuration into a documented system design (including implementation plan and timetable), which will then form the basis of our Phase 2 effort. Throughout the Phase 1 effort, we will work with our projected Fast Track partners/investors to incorporate their requirements and feedback into the design.Anticipated Benefits/Commercial Applications: Fibre Channel was a $1+ billion industry in 1999. Estimates are that by 2010 Fibre Channel will be a $10-20 billion industry. The amount of data that is stored is growing by orders of magnitude daily. Many companies involved in transaction processing have such a magnitude of data changed in a day that they cannot reliably back it up. These companies increasingly depend on reliable media that must be up nearly 100% of the time. System/Storage Area Networks for these customers must be increasingly secure, fault tolerant, and reliable. These are all characteristics of DoD systems - and increasingly becoming characteristics of commercial systems. Commercial Fibre Channel switch companies are becoming increasingly concerned about providing fault tolerance and reliability in their products. But, their products do not support the range of classes of service that our switch will. Our switch's enhanced classes of services will enable our product to fill niches that others' switches cannot fill.

Fibre Channel(FC) is a high-bandwidth, high-performance network technology which is gaining market momentum in both commercial and military arenas. For routing topology flexibility, today's system area networks require switches. To date, however, the FC technology has not been developed to efficiently support real-time quality of service (i.e., guaranteed bandwidth and latency) in a switched environment. Such real-time quality of service is needed to meet future commercial and military requirements. In Phase 1, we determined that virtual circuits would meet our goal of developing a real-time FC switch. We further specified the architecture and protocol necessary to implement switch FC virtual circuits. For Phase 2, with a combination of FasTrack and SBIR funds, we propose to build a 4x4 prototype FC virtual circuitry real-time quality of service switch. The tasks will be comprised of completing the engineering and protocol design specifications, keeping the FasTrack-funded and SBIR-funded tasks synchronized, developing the prototype switch hardware and firmware components, integrating the prototype switch components, testing and debugging the prototype switch, and conducting a final demonstration of the prototype switch. The prototype will be designed such that it can be moved into an ASIC implementation during the post-Phase 2 activities. ANTICIPATED BENEFITS/COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: Fibre Channel was a $1+ billion industry in 1999. Estimates are that by 2010 Fibre Channel will be a $10-20 billion industry. Applications that can make use of a real-time quality of service switch include system/storage area networks, tape/disk jukeboxes, video broadcasters, videoconferencing, real-time systems(avionics, data acquisitions, etc.), e-commerce transactions, and interactive databases (airline/hotel/car reservations,. credit card processing, banking, etc.). Since commercial Fibre Channel switch companies do not currently support real-time quality of service switch include system/storage area networks, tape/disk jukeboxes, video broadcasters, videoconferencing, real-time systems (avionics, data acquisition, etc.), e-commerce transactions, and interactive databases (airline/hotel/car reservations,. credits card processing, banking, etc.). Since commercial Fibre Channel switch companies do not currently support real-time quality of service in their products, our switch's capabilities will meet future demanding commercial and military real-time network requirements.

Keywords:
Fibre Channel, switch, quality of service, real-time, virtual circuit, packet switching