When you configure the switch as an FCoE-FC gateway, you assign one or more (up to 12) native Fibre Channel (FC) interfaces and at least one FCoE VLAN interface to each FC fabric. FC interfaces transport native FC traffic between the proxy gateway and the storage area network (SAN) FC. An FC SAN provides an external storage environment for servers by using the FC protocol suite. Figure 1 shows three FC SAN networking methods. Fibre Channel networks form a switched fabric because the switches in a network operate in unison as one big switch.