Cisco Data Center Fundamentals

Chapter 11

Fibre Channel Protocol Fundamentals

The previous chapter discussed the building blocks of storage in the data center. The need for scalability and flexibility led to the use of specialized storage infrastructures called storage area networks (SANs). The transport protocol is the Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP). The name comes from the British English spelling and the fact that the storage networks on which the FCP operates are built using fiber optical physical connectivity between the initiators, the targets, and the FC switches. In the SAN, the FCP runs on all the layers of the data center stack—from the physical layer, up to the applications that utilize the storage systems. In this chapter, you will get acquainted with the FCP layered ...