Chapter 3. Fibre Channel Internals

As the first successful gigabit serial transport, Fibre Channel was soon adopted as a viable architecture for block I/O applications. The fibre of Fibre Channel connotes support for both fiber-optic and copper cabling. The channel refers to its role as a gigabit, high-performance conduit between computing resources. This chapter presents an overview of the various layers that compose the Fibre Channel architecture and provides a basis for understanding Fibre Channel products and functionality.