Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP or FC/IP, also known as Fibre Channel tunneling or storage tunneling) is a protocol created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for storage technology.
From the perspective of the FC stack, FCIP provides services of the Fibre Channel Framing and Flow Control Layer (FC-2).
FCIP technology overcomes the distance limitations of native Fibre Channel, enabling geographically distributed storage area networks to be connected using existing IP infrastructure, while keeping fabric services intact.
The Fibre Channel Fabric and its devices remain unaware of the presence of the IP Network.
It uses routing instead of tunneling to enable connectivity of Fibre Channel networks over IP.