Ficon Configurations - Brocade Communications Systems StoreFabric SN6500B User Manual

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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FICON Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 831
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Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 832
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Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix manually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 834
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Saving or Copying Allow/Prohibit Matrix configurations to another device 835
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Activating an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 838
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Deleting an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
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Changing the Allow/Prohibit Matrix display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
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Cascaded FICON fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 840
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Cascaded FICON fabric merge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 843
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Port Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 848
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Swapping blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 851
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 373 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 CTC except under special circumstances.
FIGURE 373
Cascaded configuration, two domains
Figure 374 are examples of cascaded FICON configurations. IBM
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