When Fibre Channel networks were first put into operation, many storage devices were not able to natively communicate using the Fibre Channel protocol. However, the parallel SCSI bus was widely supported and many different kinds of devices were implemented with parallel SCSI support. Because Fibre Channel provides the same SCSI protocol over a different kind of medium, devices called Fibre Channel-to-SCSI routers were developed to translate Fibre Channel frames to the appropriate parallel SCSI commands. These routers include one or more Fibre Channel ports on one side, and one or more parallel SCSI bus connections on the other. Devices on the parallel SCSI bus side are presented to the Fibre Channel network as any other Fibre Channel native storage devices, as LUNs available from a Fibre Channel port.

Fibre Channel routers make it possible to use legacy parallel SCSI devices by simply plugging a box into the network on one side and the legacy parallel bus on the other side. In particular, tape libraries have relied on Fibre Channel routers to help enable direct backup of storage on the SAN.