Attaching A Ds6000 Series To An Open-Systems Host With Fibre Channel Adapters; Ficon-Attached S/390 And Zseries Hosts That The Storage Unit Supports - IBM TotalStorage DS6000 Attachment Manual

Point-to-point
Switched fabric
Arbitrated loop
Attaching a DS6000 series to an open-systems host with fibre channel
adapters
You can attach a DS6000 series to an open-systems host with fibre-channel
adapters.
Fibre channel is a 1 Gbps or 2 Gbps, full-duplex, serial communications technology
to interconnect I/O devices and host systems that are separated by tens of
kilometers.
The IBM TotalStorage DS6000 series supports SAN connections at 1 Gbps to 4
Gbps with 2 Gbps host bus adapters. The DS6000 series negotiates automatically
and determines whether it is best to run at 1 Gbps link or 2 Gbps link. The IBM
TotalStorage DS6000 series detects and operates at the higher link speed.
Fibre channel transfers information between the sources and the users of the
information. This information can include commands, controls, files, graphics, video,
and sound. Fibre-channel connections are established between fibre-channel ports
that reside in I/O devices, host systems, and the network that interconnects them.
The network consists of elements like switches, bridges, and repeaters that are
used to interconnect the fibre-channel ports.

FICON-attached S/390 and zSeries hosts that the storage unit supports

You can attach the DS6000 storage unit to FICON-attached S/390 and zSeries
hosts.
Each storage unit fibre-channel adapter has four ports. Each port has a unique
world wide port name (WWPN). You can configure the port to operate with the
FICON
supports connections to a maximum of 128 FICON hosts. On FICON, the
fibre-channel adapter can operate with fabric or point-to-point topologies. With
fibre-channel adapters that are configured for FICON, the storage unit provides the
following configurations:
v Either fabric or point-to-point topologies
v A maximum of 509 channel connections per fibre-channel port
v A maximum of 2000 logical paths on each fibre-channel port
v A maximum of 2000 N-port logins per storage image
v Access to all 64 control-unit images (16 384 CKD devices) over each FICON port
v 1750 Model 511
v Logical Subsystems 32
You can use the point-to-point topology to interconnect ports directly.
The switched-fabric topology provides the necessary switching functions to
support communication between multiple nodes. You can use a fabric to
support communication between multiple nodes.
A fibre channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL) is a ring topology where two or
more ports can be interconnected. You can use the FC-AL to interconnect
up to 127 hosts on a loop. An arbitrated loop may be connected to a fabric,
known as a public loop. When the loop is not connected to a fabric, it is
referred to as a private loop.
®
upper-layer protocol. When configured for FICON, the fibre-channel port
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Chapter 1. Introduction