The standard addresses the need for very fast transfers of large volumes of information and could relieve system manufacturers from the burden of supporting the variety of channels and networks currently in place, as it provides one standard for networking, storage and data transfer. An FC switch, or a network of switches, is called a fabric.
Information can flow between two ports in both directions simultaneously.
The port starting the Exchange is called the Originator, the port that answers is called the Responder. The data is sent in frames that are maximum 2148 bytes long. Frames have a header and a checksum. A set of related frames for one operation is called a Sequence.