SNIA

1. A Fibre Channel technology that provides a transparent fabric extension between two switch E-Ports through the use of 2 B-Ports tunneling through some alternative technology, resulting in an Inter-Switch Link (ISL) that "appears" to be a direct link between switches.

   For example, a bridge pair can take an incoming Fibre Channel frame from one B-Port on a Bridge, encapsulate that frame using FCIP (Fibre Channel over IP) and transmit the frame as payload over an IP network to the remote Bridge where the original frame is forwarded to the remote Fibre Channel Fabric switch E-Port through the remote Bridge's B-Port.

2. A Fibre Channel technology that enables traffic carried along part of the path from a source device by Fibre Channel, (for example commands, blocks, status and control between a SCSI initiator or target source device) to be extended to the destination device using an alternative physical transport network technology (for example iSCSI or SCSI Interconnect).

   In some cases this "Bridge" is also referred to as a physical transport gateway, or storage router.

3. A device that connects multiple LAN segments at the physical address layer.

As opposed to a hub, which indiscriminately rebroadcasts everything from one segment to the other, a bridge only retransmits traffic from one segment to another when the traffic is intended for the destination segment.

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