Fibre Channel

In order to avoid confusion and to create a unique name, the industry decided to change the spelling and use the British English fibre for the name of the standard.

Fibre Channel started in 1988, with ANSI standard approval in 1994, to merge the benefits of multiple physical layer implementations including SCSI, HIPPI and ESCON.

This challenge becomes evermore difficult in a mass-manufactured technology as data signal frequencies increase, with part of the technical compensation being ever reducing the supported connecting copper-parallel cable length.

FC was developed with leading-edge multi-mode optical fiber technologies that overcame the speed limitations of the ESCON protocol.

Fibre Channel has seen active development since its inception, with numerous speed improvements on a variety of underlying transport media.

This port is usually implemented in a device such as disk storage, a Host Bus Adapter (HBA) network connection on a server or a Fibre Channel switch.

The small form-factor pluggable transceiver (SFP) module and its enhanced version SFP+, SFP28 and SFP56 are common form factors for Fibre Channel ports.

SFP modules support a variety of distances via multi-mode and single-mode optical fiber as shown in the table below.

Two rows of electrical contacts enable doubling the throughput of SFP modules in a similar fashion as QSFP-DD.

The quad small form-factor pluggable (QSFP) module began being used for switch inter-connectivity and was later adopted for use in 4-lane implementations of Gen-6 Fibre Channel supporting 128GFC.

These classes are not part of the standard, and the classification of every switch is a marketing decision of the manufacturer: A fabric consisting entirely of one vendors products is considered to be homogeneous.

This is often referred to as operating in its "native mode" and allows the vendor to add proprietary features which may not be compliant with the Fibre Channel standard.

This is called the "open fabric" mode as each vendor's switch may have to disable its proprietary features to comply with the Fibre Channel standard.

However, running in native interoperability mode may still disable some proprietary features and can produce fabrics of questionable stability.

Fibre Channel HBAs, as well as CNAs, are available for all major open systems, computer architectures, and buses, including PCI and SBus.

Point-to-Point topology connection using N ports
Topology diagram of a Fibre Channel point-to-point connection
Fibre Channel is a layered technology that starts at the physical layer and progresses through the protocols to the upper-level protocols like SCSI and SBCCS.
FC topologies and port types: This diagram shows how N_Ports can be connected to a fabric or to another N_Port. A Loop Port (L_Port) communicates through a shared loop and is rarely used anymore.
A Port has a physical structure as well as logical or virtual structure. This diagram shows how a virtual port may have multiple physical ports and vice versa.
Fibre Channel predominantly uses SFP or SFP+ modules with LC connector and duplex cabling, but 128GFC uses QSFP28 modules with MPO connectors and ribbon cabling.
SFP-DD modules are used in high-density applications that need to double the throughput of traditional SFP ports.
The Fibre Channel SAN connects servers to storage via Fibre Channel switches.
Fibre Channel director with SFP+ modules and LC optical fiber connectors with Optical Multimode 3 (OM3) fiber (aqua)
Dual port 8 Gb FC host bus adapter card
Dual port 16 Gb FC host bus adapter card