General Information About Attaching To Open-Systems Host With Fibre-Channel Adapters; Fibre-Channel Architecture - IBM TotalStorage DS6000 Attachment Manual

v Logical Volumes 8192
v Volume Groups 1040
Note: FICON host channels support more devices than the 4096 possible devices
The storage unit supports the following operating systems for S/390 and zSeries
hosts:
v Transaction Processing Facility (TPF)
v Virtual Storage Extended/Enterprise Storage Architecture (VSE/ESA
v z/OS
v z/VM
v Linux
For details about models, versions of operating systems, and releases that the
storage unit supports for these host systems, see the Interoperability Matrix at
http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/interop.html.
General information about attaching to open-systems host with
fibre-channel adapters
You can attach a storage unit to host systems with fibre channel-adapters.

Fibre-channel architecture

Fibre-channel architecture provides communications protocols on the storage unit.
The storage unit provides a fibre-channel connection in the storage unit. For more
information about hosts and operating systems that the storage unit supports on the
fibre-channel adapters, see the Interoperability Matrix at
http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/interop.html.
Fibre-channel architecture provides a variety of communication protocols on the
storage unit. The units that are interconnected are referred to as nodes. Each node
has one or more ports.
A storage unit is a node in a fibre-channel network. Each port on a storage unit
fibre-channel host adapter is a fibre-channel port. A host is also a node in a
fibre-channel network. Each port attaches to a serial-transmission medium that
provides duplex communication with the node at the other end of the medium.
Storage unit architecture supports these basic interconnection topologies (network
structure):
v Point-to-point
v Switched fabric
Point-to-point topology
The point-to-point topology, also known as direct connect, enables you to
interconnect ports directly. Figure 1 on page 13 shows an illustration of a
point-to-point topology.
12
DS6000 Host Systems Attachment Guide
on a storage unit. This enables you to attach other control units or other
storage units to the same host channel up to the limit that the host supports.
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