DALLAS -- The committee setting the second-generation Fibre Channel standard will move forward again here this week after setting a schedule to merge that technology with Serial Storage Architecture (SSA). Plans to complete the new specification by October have helped to rekindle the market for the serial interface.

The committee resolved many of the fractious problems facing Fibre Channel at a meeting last month, paving the way for this week's meeting. A smooth meeting would alleviate the kind of fears that arose following plans by major disk-drive providers to merge Fibre Channel and SSA. Both had competed to succeed parallel SCSI.

The market concerns arose after a volatile meeting in Florida in October, in which it appeared that the two groups might fight and derail any successor to Fibre Channel. After that meeting, there was concern for the future of the second-generation standard and of the market for the first-generation products, which are now shipping. That concern all but disappeared after the group set an ambitious schedule to complete the new spec by October.

"I think the biggest thing we've done in the standards organization is to agree on a committee structure and set a date when the specification will be available," said Mike Fitzpatrick, a manager at Seagate Technology Inc. (Oklahoma City, Okla.), and president of the Fibre Channel Loop Community association.

Some disk-array providers and leading disk-drive vendors have begun shipping first-generation Fibre Channel products, and they expect OEM customers to follow suit in the first half of this year.

"We don't have a single system OEM customer who does not have plans for a Fibre Channel product," said Joel Reich, product manager at Clarion, a division of Data General Corp. (Westborough, Mass.). "From a standpoint of product announcements and shipments, I think we'll see a reasonable amount of stuff in the next three months."

Other observers said that, after years in development, Fibre Channel is finally moving into the market in earnest.

"People who have been thinking about doing something with the interface are going to start this year," said Dal Allan, president of ENDL Consulting (Saratoga, Calif.). "All the components are now shipping, and that's causing fear in many places that their OEM competitors are going to be making introductions this year. The SSA thing is almost like a wrinkle that people don't need right now, so many of them are going full bore with first-generation systems."

To keep the second generation of the standard on schedule, the committees have taken a new approach. Instead of a number of people working on the entire specification, small, specific-subject working groups will focus on diverse areas, determining which Fractious problems have been resolved, paving the way for a single serial interface.

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