ty. The industry is aware of this requirement. As a result, the first generation of IP storage products will have to function in a mode known as pro- tocol mediation. Products that offer this capability will enable customers in a rather short term to con- nect their legacy Fibre Channel storage products through IP networks. The following wave of endpoint storage device products will support IP storage in native mode directly on an Ethernet medium (1 GbE or 10 GbE). We will discuss network-processing issues related to multiprotocol SANs later in chapter. During this rapid industry evolution and consolidation, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working on defining standards for IP storage to support the new storage network technology trends. These efforts include the following standards: iSCSI, which is a complete transport service for SCSI traffic FCIP, which tunnels Fibre Channel traffic through an IP network FIBRE CHANNEL The Fibre Channel is a standard from the NCITS T11:I/O Interface (X3.230-1994) effort of the T11 committee of the NCITS, which works on I/O interfaces. Fibre Channel defines a highly reliable, giga- bit-plus-per-second class transport technology that allows servers, mainframes, workstations, switches, hubs, and storage devices to communicate using well-known SCSI and IP protocols based on multiple possible topologies. This combination of capabilities can tackle an organization's storage resource-sharing problem while still providing high performance, flexibility, reliability, availability, and scalability. Fibre Channel is a network/channel standard that not only specifies the physical layer over cop- per or optical fiber, but also the control and transport layers. The specified fabric is self-managed, and different topologies such as point-to-point, arbitrated loops, and switched topologies are easily sup- ported depending on the needs of a specific application. It offers connections over distances that can be up to 10 km (~6 miles) with speeds ranging from 266 Mbps to more th