Brocade Fabric OS FCIP Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 (53-1002748-01, March 2013)

2 Fabric OS FCIP Administrator’s Guide
53-1002748-01
FCIP concepts
1
FCIP concepts
Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) enables you to use existing IP wide area network (WAN) infrastructure
to connect Fibre Channel SANs. FCIP supports applications such as remote data replication (RDR),
centralized SAN backup, and data migration over very long distances that are impractical or very
costly using native Fibre Channel connections. FCIP tunnels are used to pass Fibre Channel I/O
through an IP network. FCIP tunnels are built on a physical connection between two peer switches
or blades. Fibre Channel frames enter FCIP through virtual E_Ports (VE_Ports or VEX_Ports) and are
encapsulated and passed to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) layer connections. The TCP
connections ensure in-order delivery of FC frames and lossless transmission. The Fibre Channel
fabric and all Fibre Channel targets and initiators are unaware of the presence of the IP network.
Figure 1 on page 3 shows the relationship of FC and TCP/IP layers, and the general concept of FCIP
tunneling.
• Enforcement 802.1P - VLAN
tagging
Yes Yes
FICON extension
• FICON emulation
• IBM z/OS Global Mirror
(formerly eXtended Remote
Copy or XRC) acceleration
• Tape read acceleration
• Tape write acceleration
• Teradata emulation
• Printer emulation
1
Yes Yes
IPsec
• AES encryption algorithm
Yes
Transpor t mode
Yes
Transpor t mode
VEX_Ports Yes Yes
Support for third-party WAN
optimization hardware
No
1
No
IPv6 addresses for FCIP
tunnels
2
Yes Yes
Support for jumbo frames No
MTU of 1500 is
maximum
No
MTU of 1500 is
maximum
1. Not supported in Fabric OS version v7.0 and later.
2. IPv6 addressing is not supported in conjunction with IPsec in Fabric
OS version v7.0.1 and later.
TABLE 1 FCIP capabilities by platform (Continued)
Capabilities 7800 switch FX8-24 blade