HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

Features

Features of the B-series FICON directors are as follows:

• Advanced Performance Monitor—Analyzes resource utilization throughout the fabric.

• Advanced Web Tools—Centralizes and simplifies director management through a browser-based

application.

• Advanced Zoning—Provides secure access control over fabric resources. Uses the director

firmware to enforce port and WWN zoning.

• Extended Fabrics—Enables FICON connectivity from 2.5 km (4 Gb/s), 5 km (2 Gb/s), and

10 km (1 Gb/s) up to 100 km to improve disaster recovery operations and ensure business

continuity. For more information about distance extension, see “FICON and FICON SAN

extension” (page 120).

• Fabric Manager—Centralizes fabric management through a PC server-based application.

• Fabric Watch—Proactively monitors the health and performance of directors and the fabric.

• ISL Trunking—Combines multiple links between directors to form a single, logical ISL with a

total bandwidth of up to 32 Gb/s. Enables dynamic load balancing of data across the ISLs.

Maintains guaranteed in-order delivery of FICON frames across the ISL trunk.

• High-integrity Fabrics—Required to support cascaded FICON directors. Guarantees in-order

delivery of FICON frames (across a single ISL or trunked ISLs), persistent domain IDs, and

fabric binding.

• SFOS—Provides flexible security and policy-based administration to protect data from

unauthorized access and corruption. SFOS is required with FOS versions earlier than 5.2.0a.

It is not used with FOS 5.2.0a or later.

• ACLs—Used to enforce fabric binding without requiring SFOS. Available with firmware 5.2.0a

or later.

• FICON CUP—Optional CU port that enables the mainframe to monitor and manage the director.

• FICON Port Swapping—Enables you to swap port numbers between two FICON ports.

Therefore, you can move a CU or CHPID to a different physical port without changing the

mainframe configuration. This feature is useful while troubleshooting a connectivity problem.

You can swap ports on the same director blade or across different director blades.

• NPIV—N_Port virtualization, which allows multiple Linux logical partitions to share an FCP

channel.

The following B-series FICON directors and switches are NPIV compliant:

◦ 8 Gb/s: DC SAN Backbone Director, DC04 SAN Director, 8/40 and 8/80 SAN Switches

◦ 4 Gb/s: 4/32, 4/32B, and 4/64 SAN Switches; 4/256 SAN Director

◦ 2 Gb/s: 2/32 and 2/128 SAN Switches

• Intermix—Enables FICON and FCP ports to coexist in the same director and fabric; this is

supported at the port level. Use zoning to separate FICON ports from FCP ports. For more

information, see “FICON and Fibre Channel intermix guidelines” (page 156).

• Port Fencing—Enables the fabric to automatically isolate a port that is behaving outside the

bounds of expected operation. This enhances overall stability of the fabric in the event of an

isolated condition that would otherwise cause a major disruption. Port Fencing is included as

part of the optional licensed Fabric Watch feature and requires FOS 6.1.0 or later.

Features for Fabric OS 6.x and later are as follows:

• Adaptive networking with QoS (optional licensed feature available in Fabric OS 6.0 or

later)—Provides high-priority connections that obtain the necessary bandwidth for optimum

36 B-series FICON directors and fabric rules