User's Manual

Brocade Network Advisor IP User Manual 695
53-1003056-01
Chapter
21
FICON Environments
In this chapter
FICON configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695
Configuring a switch for FICON operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 696
Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 702
Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix manually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 704
Saving or copying Allow/Prohibit Matrix configurations to another device 705
Activating an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 708
Deleting an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 708
Changing the Allow/Prohibit Matrix display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709
Cascaded FICON fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 709
Cascaded FICON fabric merge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 712
Port groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717
Swapping blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 720
FICON configurations
NOTE
FICON configurations are available only for Fabric OS products.
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:
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 250 and Figure 251 are examples of cascaded FICON configurations. IBM
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.