Both ideas were discussed at the Fibre Channel Technologies Conference, held here Wednesday (Oct. 11), in a panel on high-speed versions of the interface. Meanwhile, strong progress has been made on 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel, with end-to-end systems likely to be built by next year, panelists said.

Fibre Channel is expected to move to 10 Gbits/s in order to exploit the optical transceivers already being manufactured for Fibre Channel — and eventually for Ethernet — at that speed.

But disk drive manufacturers, who use Fibre Channel for internal links, need to stick to CMOS-based parts in order to keep costs down, said Skip Jones, chairman of the Fibre Channel Industry Association.

"10 Gbit/s is a much too expensive notion for a disk drive," he said. "They have to keep everything close to CMOS. Even gallium arsenide is too expensive for them."

As a result, some FCIA members are studying the possibility of 4.25 Gbit/s Fibre Channel, driven by CMOS components. This standard would use copper lines rather than fiber optics, partly because no 4-Gbit/s optical transceivers exist, and no manufacturer is likely to initiate such products just for the Fibre Channel market, Jones said.

The catch is that CMOS can't yet reach 4-Gbit/s speeds. Behind the 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel idea is the hope that by the time the FCIA is ready to consider a standard, CMOS will have reached that speed.

"That's what it's about, intersecting the forecast process capabilities," Jones said.

But panelists made it clear that the 4-Gbit/s standard is intended only for disk drives. "We aren't going to force IT managers to deploy 4-Gig SANs storage-area networks," said Bob Whitson, Agilent Technologies Inc. worldwide marketing manager for SAN products.

Meanwhile, the 2.125-Gbit/s version of Fibre Channel has done well since its debut at Comdex a year ago, panelists said, with all of the necessary components either in or approaching volume production. "The plumbing part of this is behind us," Jones said.

A second critical factor for 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel is the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) development of T11, an autonegotiation standard that allows 2-Gbit/s Fibre Channel components to be plugged into a system running the current 1-Gbit/s standard. This would allow OEMs to sell systems that are capable of running at 2 Gbit/s but can plug into 1-Gbit/s environments.

After a false start with a proposal that had "some holes in it," it appears that T11 will provide a solid autonegotiation standard, Jones said.

"They're just looking for corner cases now. The algorithms are already being distributed," Whitson said.