Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP or FC/IP, also known as Fibre Channel tunneling or storage tunneling) is a protocol created 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 ...
(IETF) for storage technology.
An FCIP entity encapsulates
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 ...
frames using
TCP segments and forwards them over an IP network to another FCIP entity which decapsulates them and restores the original FC frames. From the perspective of the IP stack, FCIP runs in the
application layer
An application layer is an abstraction layer that specifies the shared communication protocols and interface methods used by hosts in a communications network. An ''application layer'' abstraction is specified in both the Internet Protocol Su ...
. From the perspective of the FC stack, FCIP provides services of the
Fibre Channel Framing and Flow Control Layer (FC-2).
FCIP technology overcomes the distance limitations of native Fibre Channel, enabling geographically distributed
storage area network
A storage area network (SAN) or storage network is a computer network which provides access to consolidated, block device, block-level data storage. SANs are primarily used to access Computer data storage, data storage devices, such as disk ...
s to be connected using existing IP infrastructure, while keeping fabric services intact. The Fibre Channel Fabric and its devices remain unaware of the presence of the IP Network.
Similar protocols
A competing technology to FCIP is known as
iFCP
Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) is a gateway-to-gateway network protocol standard that provides Fibre Channel fabric functionality to Fibre Channel devices over an IP network. It is officially ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Fo ...
. It uses routing instead of tunneling to enable connectivity of Fibre Channel networks over IP.
See also
*
IP over Fibre Channel (IPFC)
*
Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP)
*
Internet SCSI (iSCSI)
*
Fibre Channel over Ethernet
Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is a computer network technology that encapsulates Fibre Channel frames over Ethernet networks. This allows Fibre Channel to use 10 Gigabit Ethernet networks (or higher speeds) while preserving the Fibre Channel ...
References
Application layer protocols
Fibre Channel
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