• Connects Fibre Channel SAN islands over an IP network • Many-to-many loosely coupled architecture • iFCP switches map FC to IP and proxy FCIDs between SANs • Disruption in one region does not propagate to other regions • Controlled by “zoning” on the iFCP switch
After FCIP was developed (by SAN Valley) as a standard and the vendors started to use it, another company (NISHAN) proposed iFCP (the internet Fibre Channel Protocol).
iFCP still extends Fibre Channel over an IP network back to Fibre Channel. The difference is, whereas FCIP was a FC network to FC network extension protocol and merged the fabrics, iFCP is a FC device to FC device extension protocol. It doesn’t merge the fabrics.