Patent ID: 8307048

Claim:
A method of communicating, comprising: discovering, by a first host network device in a Fibre Channel Over Ethernet (FCoE) initiator system, other network devices wherein one of the other network devices is a target network device; generating, by the first host network device in the FCoE initiator system, an FCoE data packet; designating as the target network device, by the first host network device in the FCoE initiator system, a target Fibre Channel (FC) storage device in a storage area network (SAN) target system, the target network device being a target for the FCoE data packet; converting, by an Ethernet component gateway in the FCoE initiator system, the FCoE data packet into an FCIP data packet by extracting an FC data packet from the FCoE data packet and encapsulating the FC data packet in the FCIP data packet; transmitting, by the Ethernet component gateway, the FCIP data packet to the SAN target system via an IP data pathway; receiving, by a SAN component gateway in the SAN target system, the FCIP data packet, thus providing a received FCIP data packet; extracting, by the SAN component gateway, a SAN data packet from the received FCIP data packet by removing an FCIP header from the received FCIP packet to provide the extracted SAN data packet; and sending, by the SAN component gateway, the extracted SAN data packet to the target FC storage device via a SAN fabric between the SAN component gateway and the target FC storage device; wherein the discovering by the first host network device in the FCoE initiator system of other network devices further includes: logging in, by the target FC storage device, to the SAN fabric thus generating login data including target network device information, the login data further including fabric name and switch name information, and retrieving from the SAN fabric, by the Ethernet component gateway, the login data including target network device information to provide target network device information to the Ethernet component gateway for use by the first host network device in communications between the first host network device and the target FC storage device in accordance with the converting step and the extracting step.