Switched Fabric in Fibre Channel
In the Fibre Channel switched fabric (FC-SW) topology, devices are connected to each other through one or more Fibre Channel switches. While this topology has the best scalability of the three FC topologies (the other two are Arbitrated loop and point-to-point), it is the only one requiring switches, which are costly hardware devices.
Visibility among devices (called nodes) in a fabric is typically controlled with zoning.
Multiple switches in a fabric usually form a mesh network, with devices being on the "edges" ("leaves") of the mesh. Most Fibre Channel network designs employ two separate fabrics for redundancy. The two fabrics share the edge nodes (devices), but are otherwise unconnected. One of the advantages of such setup is capability of failover, meaning that in case one link breaks or a fabric goes out of order, datagrams can be sent via the second fabric.
The fabric topology allows the connection of up to the theoretical maximum of 16 million devices, limited only by the available address space (224).
Read more about this topic: Switched Fabric
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