Category: General

FC Layers

Fibre Channel consists of the following layers:

FC-0 — The interface to the physical media
FC-1 — The encoding and decoding of data and out-of-band physical link control information for transmission over the physical media
FC-2 — The transfer of frames, sequences and exchanges comprising protocol information units.
FC-3 — Common services required for advanced features such as striping, hunt group and multicast.
FC-4 — Application interfaces that can execute over Fibre Channel such as the Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI (FCS).

FC Ports

• N_Port (Node port) An N_Port is typically an HBA port that connects to a switch’s F_Port or another N_Port. Nx_Port communicating through a PN_Port that is not operating a Loop Port State Machine.
• F_Port (Fabric port) An F_Port is a switch port that is connected to an N_Port.
• E_Port (Expansion port) Switch port that attaches to another E_Port to create an Inter-Switch Link.