1.3. Fibre Channel for Mass Storage

Since Fibre Channel is a generic data transport mechanism, Fibre Channel can transmit a number of existing networking and I/O protocols:

I/O protocols:

• SCSI

• HIPPI

• IPI

Network protocols:

• IP

• IEEE 802.2

Hewlett-Packard has chosen to support the SCSI-3 protocol over Fibre Channel for its mass storage environment. Mass storage consists of several device classes:

• tapes

• disks

• disk arrays