Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) is a gateway-to-gateway

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of ...

standard that provides

Fibre Channel Fibre Channel (FC) is a high-speed data transfer protocol providing in-order, lossless delivery of raw block data. Fibre Channel is primarily used to connect computer data storage to Server (computing), servers in storage area networks (SAN) in ...

fabric functionality to Fibre Channel devices over an IP network. It is officially ratified by the

Internet Engineering Task Force The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

. Its most common forms are in 1 Gbit/s, 2 Gbit/s, 4 Gbit/s, 8 Gbit/s, and 10 Gbit/s, a shortened version of Gigabits per second also known as 1,000 megabits per second.

Technical overview

The iFCP protocol enables the implementation of Fibre Channel functionality over an IP network, within which the Fibre Channel switching and

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a Network theory, network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched ...

infrastructure is replaced by IP components and technology. Congestion control, error detection and recovery are provided through the use of TCP (

Transmission Control Protocol The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main communications protocol, protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, th ...

). The primary objective of iFCP is to allow existing Fibre Channel devices to be networked and interconnected over an IP based network at wire speeds. The method of address translation defined and the protocol permit Fibre Channel storage devices and host adapters to be attached to an IP-based fabric using transparent gateways. The iFCP protocol layer's main function is to transport Fibre Channel frame images between Fibre Channel

ports Ports collections (or ports trees, or just ports) are the sets of makefiles and Patch (Unix), patches provided by the BSD-based operating systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, as a simple method of installing software or creating binary packages. T ...

attached both locally and remotely. iFCP encapsulates and routes the fibre channel frames that make up each Fibre Channel information unit via a predetermined TCP connection for transport across the IP network when transporting frames to a remote Fibre Channel port.

References

{{Reflist, 30em Ethernet Fibre Channel Network protocols Internet protocols

Technical overview

See also

References