Fibre Channel SAN Extension over IP FCIP & iFCP Comparison
FCIP and iFCP
FCIP: WAN disruptions result in fabric reconfiguration
iFCP: WAN disruptions result in device de-registration
SAN Fabric Site A
Class F, RSCNs Storage Traffic
Temporary outage in WAN Link
Site B
• Temporary outage in WAN results in destructive fabric reconfiguration as fabrics segment into two
• Recovery of the WAN link results in a second disruptive fabric reconfiguration to rejoin fabrics
FCIP
If we get a wide area network failure, this would force fabric segmentation To speed up the process it is recommended that you should always configure static domain ID’s
iFCP
If we get wide area disruption there are no local rebuilds, no local disruption. The only traffic that will be affected is the session traffic going over the IP network.
Site A
SAN Fabric
SAN Fabric #1
iFCP Sessions
IP Network
Temporary outage in WAN Link
Site B
• Temporary outage in WAN results in non-disruptive name server de- registration for inaccessible devices
• Recovery of the WAN causes quick registration of the devices