Fibre Channel is the technology for transmitting data between computer devices at data rates of up to 1 or 2 Gbps. Future Fibre Channel technologies are going to get this rate enhanced to around 10 Gbps. Fibre Channel is especially suited for connecting computer servers to shared storage devices and for interconnecting storage controllers and drives.

Since Fibre Channel is three times as fast, it has begun to replace the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) as the transmission interface between servers and clustered storage devices. Fibre channel is more flexible; devices can be as far as ten kilometers (about six miles) apart if optical fiber is used as the physical medium. Fibre Channel works on coaxial cables for shorter distances thereby protecting your investment.

Fibre Channel offers point-to-point, switched, and loop interfaces. It is designed to interoperate with SCSI, the Internet Protocol (IP) and other protocols.

Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP or FC/IP, also known as Fibre Channel tunneling or storage tunneling) is an Internet Protocol (IP)-based storage networking technology developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). FCIP mechanisms enable the transmission of Fibre Channel (FC) information by tunneling data between storage area network (SAN) facilities over IP networks; this capacity facilitates data sharing over a geographically distributed enterprise. One of two main approaches to storage data transmission over IP networks, FCIP is among the key technologies expected to help bring about rapid development of the storage area network market by increasing the capabilities and performance of storage data transmission.