What is a Fibre Channel SAN?

Fibre Channel, or FC, is a gigabit-speed network technology primarily used for storage networking. Fibre Channel is standardized in the T11 Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)–accredited standards committee. It started use primarily in the supercomputer field, but has become the standard connection type for storage area networks (SAN) in enterprise storage. Despite common connotations of its name, Fibre Channel signaling can run on both twisted pair copper wire and fiber-optic cables; said another way, fiber (ending in "er") always denotes an optical connection, whereas fibre (ending in "re") is always the spelling used in "fibre channel" and denotes a physical connection which may or may not be optical. (Wikipedia)