A
serial data transfer architecture developed by a consortium of computer and
mass storage device manufacturers and now being standardized by
ANSI. The most prominent Fibre Channel standard is
Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL). FC-AL was designed for new mass storage devices and other peripheral devices that require very high bandwidth. Using optical fiber to connect devices, FC-AL supports full-duplex data transfer rates of 100MBps. FC-AL is compatible with, and is expected to eventually replace, SCSI for high-performance storage systems.