Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP or FC/IP, also known as Fibre Channel tunneling or storage tunneling), is an Internet Protocol (IP) was created by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as storage technology.
An FCIP Entity functions to forward Fibre Channel frames after encapsulating them and viewed from an IP Network perspective, these entities are peers that communicate using TCP/IP.
The main advantage of FCIP is that it overcomes the distance limitations of native Fibre Channel, and its ability to enable geographically distributed devices to be linked using the existing IP infrastructure, while keeping fabric services intact.
A competing technology to FCIP is known as iFCP. It used routing instead of tunneling to enable connectivity of Fibre Channel networks over IP.