What's FICON?

1) FICON, what is it? I know it stands for fiber connectivity, but what is it? Is it another name for the FC protocol? If it is something different, what is it and what are its uses?

2) InfiniBand, it's a type of I/O technology, but I'veI also read articles describing it as a protocol like iSCSI. How can this be seeing that PCI isn't considered a protocol?

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FICON is the Fibre Channel version of ESCON. Escon was the first fiber optic I/O channel technology developed by IBM for mainframe system and storage connectivity. Escon was limited to 17MB/sec bandwidth.

You are correct. IB is not a protocol. IB is a serial system bus. IB will transport other protocols such as IP and VI.

Regards,
Marc

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This was first published in April 2002