Ficon-Attached Zseries Hosts - IBM TotalStorage DS6000 Introduction And Planning Manual

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 zSeries hosts

The DS6000 series supports FICON-attached and zSeries hosts.
® ™
The storage unit attaches to S/390 and zSeries host systems with FICON
channels. Each storage unit fibre channel adapter has one port. You can configure
the port to operate with the FICON upper-layer protocol. When configured for
FICON, the fibre channel port 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 DS6800
series supports the following:
v Either fabric or point-to-point topologies
v A maximum of 128 channel connections per fibre-channel port
v A maximum of 32 logical subsystems
v A maximum of 8192 logical volumes
v A maximum of 1040 volume groups
The DS6800 supports the following operating systems for zSeries hosts:
v Transaction Processing Facility (TPF)
™
v Virtual Storage Extended/Enterprise Storage Architecture (VSE/ESA )
v z/OS
®
v z/VM
FICON is an optional feature on the DS6800 system, and is available with the
FICON Attachment feature number 5915.
For details about models, versions of operating systems, and releases that the
DS6800 supports for these host systems, see the DS6000 series Interoperability
Matrix at:
http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/interop.html
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Chapter 1. Introduction