An Inifiniband (IB) network that incorporates a Fibre Channel (FC) network
is disclosed. The IB and FC networks are coupled by a gateway that maps
the FC network to a virtual IB network. In generating the virtual IB
network, the gateway may provide a virtual IB target for each node port
in the FC network, and may further provide a minimum number of virtual IB
switches necessary to support the virtual IB targets. The gateway assigns
a globally unique identifier (GUID) to each of the virtual IB targets,
and may further associate local identifiers (LID) with the virtual IB
targets. The gateway preferably emulates subnet management agents (SMA)
and general service agents (GSA) of the virtual IB targets when
management IB packets are received, and the gateway preferably converts
non-management IB packets directed to the virtual IB targets into FC
frames directed to the corresponding target FC devices.