But this is pricey compared to short-wave, which can only manage 500m, whereas the even cheaper copper is limited to 30m and is used mainly for clustering. GBICs can be mixed and hot-swapped, which makes for great flexibility and redundancy, although they do add to the cost and can vary in price. As such, we haven't included the cost of GBICs in the prices quoted in our reviews. Depending on the size of the SAN, the switches required can vary greatly in price, added to which you need to consider the cost of the cabling, and Fibre Channel interfaces for the disks and servers involved. Most businesses end up buying nearly everything from the one supplier, usually a system integrator, which will also handle installation.
Few companies are brave enough to go it alone where SANs are concerned.
But, it's as well to be armed with some knowledge when choosing a supplier and the aim of this shoot-out is to provide a primer in at least some of the basics. Features table Highlights Market leader Brocade is widely known with its products available in a variety of guises, badged by Compaq, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others. The Gadzoox Capellix 3000 was the only pure loop switch that we looked at. The others were more expensive fabric switches with optional loop emulation, if required. Although there's a move towards interoperability and common management interfaces, proprietary management software is currently shipped with all the switches we looked at.