Fibre Channel

A serial data transfer architecture developed by a consortium of computer and mass storage device manufacturers and now being standardized by ANSI. Fibre Channel can be used to create a network using special hardware interfaces to provide very high speed connections between storage devices (hard drives, RAIDs, etc.) and computers. The connections are usually done with optical cables, but coaxial cable and regular telephone twisted pair can be used under some circumstances. It can be used along with or instead of SCSI or other mass storage media and is proving to be a very effective technology for large audio and/or video production environments because it allows many users to access the same physical storage media at speeds high enough to do meaningful work without having to copy individual files to a local hard drive. Many operators can literally be working on the same project (and in some cases the same file) at the same time.