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Information about Internet Fibre Channel Protocol

Internet Fibre Channel Protocol (iFCP) is a gateway to gateway network protocol standard, officially ratified by the Internet Engineering Task Force, which provides Fibre Channel fabric functionality to fibre channel devices over an IP network.

Technical Overview

The iFCP protocol enables the implementation of fibre channel functionality over an IP network, within which the fibre channel switching and routing infrastructure is replaced by IP components and technology. Congestion control, error detection and recovery are provided through the use of TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). The primary objective of iFCP is to allow existing fibre channel devices to be networked and interconnected over an IP based network at wire speeds.

The method of address translation defined and the protocol permit fibre channel storage devices and host adapters to be attached to an IP-based fabric using transparent gateways.

The iFCP protocol layer's main function is to transport Fibre Channel frame images between Fibre Channel ports attached both locally and remotely. iFCP encapsulates and routes the fibre channel frames that make up each Fibre Channel information unit via a predetermined TCP connection for transport across the IP network when transporting frames to a remote Fibre Channel port.

See Also

External links

RFCs

  • RFC 4172 - A Protocol for Internet Fibre Channel Storage Networking (iFCP)

Other Links

In telecommunications, the term gateway has the following meanings:
  • In a communications network, a network node equipped for interfacing with another network that uses different protocols.

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protocol is a convention or standard that controls or enables the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints. In its simplest form, a protocol can be defined as the rules governing the syntax, semantics, and synchronization of communication.
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Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standard bodies; and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite.
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Fibre Channel is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), an American National Standards Institute
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Internet protocol may refer to:
  • The Internet Protocol, a data-oriented protocol used for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork
  • The Internet protocol suite, a set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs

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  • For electrical switching in general, see switch.
  • For telephone switching, see telephone exchange.
  • For railroad turnouts, see railroad switch.
  • For Local Area Network switching, see LAN switching.

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Routing (or routeing) is the process of selecting paths in a network along which to send data or physical traffic. Routing is performed for many kinds of networks, including the telephone network, the Internet, and transport networks.
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The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. TCP provides reliable, in-order delivery of a stream of bytes, making it suitable for applications like file transfer and e-mail.
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Wire speed or wirespeed refers to the hypothetical maximum data transmission rate of a cable or other transmission medium. The wire speed is dependent on the physical and electrical properties of the cable, combined with the lowest level of the connection protocols.
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Address translation or address resolution may refer to:
  • Address Resolution Protocol or ARP, a computer networking protocol used to find out the hardware address of a host (usually a MAC address), when only the network layer address is known.

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computing protocols, see Protocol (computing). For protocols on two-way voice communications, see Voice procedure. For other meanings of the word protocol, see Protocol.
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A storage device is a device used for storing something.
  • When storing goods a box or container of some kind may be used.
  • For different kinds of digital information (data), a data storage device may be used.

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host controller, host adapter, or host bus adapter (HBA) connects a host system (the computer) to other network and storage devices. The terms are primarily used to refer to devices for connecting SCSI, Fibre Channel and eSATA devices, but devices for
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In computer networking, a frame is a data packet of fixed or variable length which has been encoded by a data link layer communications protocol for digital transmission over a node-to-node link.
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In computer hardware, a 'port' serves as an interface between the computer and other computers or devices. Physically, a port is a specialized outlet on a piece of equipment to which a plug or cable connects.
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Internet SCSI (iSCSI) is a network protocol standard, officially ratified on 2003-02-11 by the Internet Engineering Task Force, that allows the use of the SCSI protocol over TCP/IP networks. iSCSI is a transport layer protocol in the SCSI-3 specifications framework.
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