(
FIber
CONnector) An IBM mainframe channel introduced with its G5 servers in 1998. Based on the Fibre Channel standard, it boosts the transfer rate of ESCON's half-duplex 17MB/sec to a full-duplex 100MB/sec. Each FICON channel can support up to 4,000 I/O operations per second and is equivalent to eight ESCON channels. See
ESCON and
Parallel Enterprise Server.