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Mission Viejo, Calif. - The Fiber Channel interface is starting to creep into the peripheral marketplace. With marketing strategies and products surfacing last week, vendors are gearing up for Comdex and positioning themselves to get in on a high-speed standard that could become the successor to SCSI.
Unisys Corp.'s Storage Solutions Division has entered the OEM marketplace with a Fiber Channel storage system. Symbios Logic brought out a Fiber Channel disk array, underscoring predictions that arrays will be one of the first storage technologies to use the 100-Mbyte/second link. And on the infrastructure front, Amp Inc. signed a technology pact with Fujikura Ltd. that gives Amp marketing rights to Fujikura's link cards.
'Big opportunity'
"Fiber Channel represents a big opportunity," said Fred Hanhauser, director of OEM sales at Unisys. "We looked at our product lines a year ago and found we didn't have a product set that we could OEM. We designed our new products strictly for that market, not for our installed base. We felt that to get into the OEM market, we had to focus on a new technology."
The shift from parallel SCSI to serial interfaces is expected to begin next year, as products become more widely available. Currently, a...