Storage Networking Architectures
Storage Transport Protocols
Why Fibre Channel?
• Fibre Channel SAN over long distance connection:
– Primarily FC ‘over’ IP - since many WANs use IP
– FC-BB (backbone) standard
IP storage applications also include connecting Fibre Channel SANs over
distance—SAN extension. The Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) protocol is the
most widely used protocol for IP-based SAN extension. iFCP and iSCSI are
also alternatives. iFCP is currently a single-vendor protocol (McDATA) and
iSCSI is primarily a host-to-target protocol, not a SAN-to-SAN gateway
protocol.
FCIP is based on the Fibre Channel Backbone (FC-BB) standard:
Designed to connect FC SANs over long distances
FC-BB model implemented in the FCIP protocol
Also implementations for ATM and SONET/SDH
Creates one distributed SAN with a unified name space
FC can also be carried natively over SONET/SDH and DWDM networks.
These implementations do not use IP.