This standard specifies Generic Services that may be used to support management and operation of a Fibre Channel Fabric. It incudes services relating to device and topology discovery, Fabric zoning, Fibre Channel security, time synchronization, address alias groups, event reporting, and performance monitoring.

This standard provides clarifications, corrections, service enhancements, and new services to the specification in ANSI INCITS 427:2007, and is recommended rather than ANSI INCITS 427:2007 to guide the development of new products. In addition, this standard removes the specifications of certain functions no longer of significance to the community.