Fibre Channel is a short-run storage protocol that runs over optical cable. It's used for connecting storage to servers in traditional SANs and for connecting storage to SAN controllers.
FCIP tunnels Fibre Channel commands over an IP network, giving you FC functionality without the short-run and optical limitations.
Finally, iSCSI is similar to FCIP but tunnels SCSI disk commands over IP. The iSCSI market has evolved such that the device normally on the other end is not just a hard disk, but a disk array.
All these technologies make remote storage appear as a local drive, but performance varies--any IP-based storage is slowed by network bandwidth and the requirements to package and unpackage data, while FC is limited by requiring specialized hardware at each end. Cisco's position: FC will continue to grow; FCIP will be used to interconnect SANs and simplify backups; and iSCSI will be useful at the low end. We question whether, long term, FC has legs and whether FCIP will gain popularity.
Still, Cisco's platform is hard to beat if your crystal ball tells you the only constant in the storage space--at least for the next several years--will be change. Although we believe IP-based storage will win out eventually, other industry pundits say iSCSI will never be high-performance enough to compete with Fibre Channel directly. Cisco has deftly managed to appease both sides with its 9000 Series line of SAN switches. If you need FC today but require FCIP access to a remote SAN or consider iSCSI a serious threat to FC, then Cisco has a box for you: the 9216i. Just call it Switzerland.
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