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An ANSI standardoriginally intended for high-speed SANs connectingservers, disc arrays, and backup devices, also lateradapted to form the physical layer of Gigabit Ethernet.Development work on Fibre channel started in 1988 and it wasapproved by the ANSI standards committee in 1994, running at100Mb/s. More recent innovations have seen the speed of FibreChannel SANs increase to 10Gb/s. Several topologies arepossible with Fibre Channel, the most popular being a numberof devices attached to one (or two, for redundancy) centralFibre Channel switches, creating a reliable infrastructurethat allows servers to share storage arrays or tape libraries.One common use of Fibre Channel SANs is for high availabilitydatabaseq clusters where two servers are connected to onehighly reliable RAID array. Should one server fail, theother server can mount the array itself and continueoperations with minimal downtime and loss of data.Other advanced features include the ability to have serversand hard drives seperated by hundreds of miles or to rapidlymirror data between servers and hard drives, perhaps inseperate geographic locations.Fibre Channel Industry Association(http://fibrechannel.org) (FCIA).