Abstract

Recently, there has been a rapidly growing demand for ultrafast and large-capacity storage networking technology. This is due to the explosive increase in the amount of data handled in business settings. The technology makes it possible to share and back up data synchronously at multiple remote storage sites on a real-time basis. This is also of great importance in terms of disaster recovery. Currently, fiber channels (FC) have normally been used for the connection between storage systems and network servers in a storage area network (SAN) with a maximum transmission speed of 1-2 Gbit/s and a transmission distance of below 10 km using a single-mode fiber and a 1.3-pm laser diode [1]. Despite the possibility of increasing the maximum speed to 4 Gbit/s, the FC-based SAN (FC-SAN) cannot efficiently process the 1-10 Tbyte levels of data used in a single company. Additionally the SCSI-3 protocol used in FC-SAN is a major factor increasing the system cost. IP storage technology is an attractive way to overcome the above drawbacks. For instance, 10 Gbit/s Ethernet technology can be used and is capable of cheaper and longer distance transmissions. This also means that technologies targeting future advanced IP photonic networks can be used with IP storage. In this work, we propose a novel ultrafast photonic interface for use in storage networking based on all-optical serial-to-parallel and photonic parallel-to-serial conversion. We demonstrate its operation with 40-Gbit/s 16-bit optical data using compact modules and a potential bandwidth of over 100 Gbit/s. We discuss the advantages of the interface and its possible application forms in storage networking.

© 2003 Optical Society of America