FICON Environments
In this chapter
FICON configurations
IBM Fibre Connection (FICON) is a protocol used between IBM (and compatible) mainframes and
storage. FICON configurations can be categorized into three types, based on complexity:
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Brocade Network Advisor SAN User Manual
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FICON configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1017
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Port groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1041
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Swapping blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1044
Point-to-point configurations that do not use a switch.
Switched point-to-point configurations, also called single switch configurations, connect a host
channel to a storage control unit using a single switch. In this type of configuration, the
channel is configured to use single-byte addressing.
Cascaded configurations, also called high integrity fabrics, connect host channels and storage
control units that reside in different domains. Cascaded FICON fabrics must be configured as
high integrity fabrics. In this type of configuration, the channel is configured to use two-byte link
addressing.
Figure 460
and
does not support configurations that have more than two domains in a path from a FICON
Channel interface to a FICON Control Unit interface to Channel-to-Channel (CTC) except under
special circumstances.
FIGURE 460
Cascaded configuration, two domains
Figure 461
are examples of cascaded FICON configurations. IBM
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