The two most important key elements of a Fibre Channel network are nodes and fabric.
Nodes are the end systems and fabric is the collection of switching elements.
The five layers of Fibre Channel define the physical media and transmission rates, encoding scheme, framing protocol and flow control, common services, and the upper-level protocol interfaces. It specifies the physical link of the channel. It also defines the rules for the signaling protocol and describes transfer of the data frame, sequence, and exchanges. Fibre Channel loops provides a low cost solution for allowing multiple devices to share gigabit bandwidth. Up to 127 nodes may be in a loop.