I recently got my hands on a couple of old Fujitsu servers, all of which contain two PCIe fibre channel cards (Emulex ones). I also own a fibre channel switch. Is it possible to use the FC ports as networking interfaces to communicate via TCP/UDP or is FC solely intended for the SCSI protocol?
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Practically, probably not. Some drivers did support IPFC on a couple different operating systems, but its probably not maintained. Even a few years ago this was dreadfully obscure, see: How do I set up IP over FC?
In theory IP over a fancy lossless network with multipathing is nice. It can work, but the complexity just isn't worth it for many use cases. Commodity Ethernet is cheaper.
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John Mahowald
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Thank you for your answer and the link. I think I will stick to ethernet. – janoliver May 01 '16 at 20:11