Contact:
Lynn Barra
lbarra@itic.org
202-626-5739

INCITS’ 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel Standard Earns Prompt ANSI Approval
10 GFC Addresses Port and Link Bandwidth Limitations

Washington, DC – November 5, 2003 – Following October 17 approval by the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has accepted the standard for 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel (INCITS 364).  The new American National Standard describes the Fiber Channel  physical layer for the transport of data at a rate of approximately 10 Gb/s in each direction.  The net bandwidth of such a link is about 2.5 GBytes/second.

Known as 10 GFC, it was developed by INCITS Technical Committee T11, which is responsible for standards development in the areas of Intelligent Peripheral Interface (IPI), High-Performance Parallel Interface (HIPPI) and Fibre Channel (FC).  

 “This is an important step in the high performance road for Fibre Channel,” said Robert Snively of Brocade Communications who serves as Chair of INCITS TC T11.  “It is attractive to people with port bandwidth and link bandwidth limitations.  In other words, it helps put as much data through existing ports and fibre as possible.”

“As bandwidth requirements increase, the 10 GFC standard will be more and more desirable in the marketplace,” Snively added.

The next meeting of T11, which is open to all interested parties, is scheduled for December 8-12 at Paradise Island, BA, Bahamas.  For further information, contact rsnively@brocade.com .

About INCITS
INCITS (www.incits.org ) is the primary U.S. focus of standardization in the field of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) encompassing storage, processing, transfer, display, management, organization, and retrieval of information. As such, INCITS also serves as the American National Standards Institute's (ANSI) Technical Advisory Group for ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1. JTC 1 is responsible for International standardization in the field of information technology. INCITS is accredited by ANSI and operates under its rules, designed to ensure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of directly and materially affected interests.

INCITS Executive Board of supplier and customer members includes Apple Computer, EIA, Farance Inc., Food Marketing Institute (FMI), Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ICCP, IEEE, Intel, Microsoft, Network Appliance, NIST, Office of the Secretary Defense /Science & Technology, Oracle, Panasonic Technologies, Purdue University, Sony Electronics, Sun Microsystems, the Uniform Code Council, and Unisys.