Fibre Channel was not the first storage protocol solution but it did change the nature of how Data Centers worked. It could be argued that Fibre Channel was the first widely-adopted open standard interface that merged the performance and reliability of local storage with the connectivity and distance of networks. Originally, and for several years afterwards, one of the main strengths of Fibre Channel was its raw power. At a time when I/O interfaces were capable of 20 MB/s (such as SCSI or ESCON), Fibre Channel rocked everyone’s world with 100 MB/s. While others worked in half-duplex mode (limiting data to being moved in one direction at a time), Fibre Channel was full-duplex. While others were limited to only a few meters (SCSI was limited to under 7m, and only 7 devices), Fibre Channel allowed thousands of devices to be connected over distances of kilometers.
Read the source article at Fibre Channel Industry Association