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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Fibre Channel (FC)

A high-speed, lossless storage networking protocol that carries block SCSI or NVMe traffic between servers and storage arrays.

Definition

FC runs at 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128 Gb/s (Gen 7 and Gen 8 are 64G). Fabrics are built from FC switches and use credit-based flow control to avoid frame loss. Redundant A and B fabrics are standard practice.

Example

Each server has two HBAs, one cabled to fabric A and one to fabric B.

Exam tip

Fibre Channel is lossless by design using buffer-to-buffer credits; Ethernet needs DCB features to approach this.

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