HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide
FICON-specific features of the C-series FICON directors are as follows:
• Persistent domain ID—Required for cascaded FICON director support.
• In-order frame delivery—Guarantees in-order delivery of FICON frames across a single ISL
or PortChannel ISLs.
• Fabric binding—Required for cascaded FICON director support.
• 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 FICON port numbers on the same switching modules, or across different
switching modules.
• NPIV—N_Port ID Virtualization, which allows multiple Linux logical partitions to share an FCP
channel. This feature requires SAN-OS 3.2(1a) or later.
• Intermix—Allows FICON and FCP ports to coexist in the same director and fabric. This is
supported at the port level. Use VSANs or zoning to separate FICON ports from FCP ports.
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For more information, see “FICON and Fibre Channel intermix guidelines” (page 156).
• FICON Tape Accelerator—Reduces application latency caused by tape write and read
operations over long distance FCIP ISLs.
Additional features of the directors (SN8000C Supervisor 2A Fabric-2 Director Switches, SN8000C
Supervisor 2A Fabric 3 Director Switches, and MDS 95xx) are as follows:
• Nondisruptive software upgrades
• Hot-swappable line cards, supervisors, power supplies, and SFP transceivers
• Redundant supervisor, cross-bar fabric, and power supplies
Table 19 (page 57) compares the high-availability features of the C-series FICON directors.
Table 19 C-series FICON director high-availability feature comparison
Protocol
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Port
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Nondisruptive
code activation
Redundant
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control
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Redundant/
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hot-swappable
cooling
Redundant/
hot-swappable
powerModel support
module
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supportprocessor
FICON
YesYesYesYes/YesYes/Yes
SN8500C 8-slot
16Gb FC Director
Switch
FC
FICON
NoYesNoYes/YesYes/YesMDS 9134
FC
FICON
YesNoNoYes/YesYes/Yes
MDS
9216/9216A/9216i
Multilayer Fabric
FC
FCIP
iSCSI
FICON
YesYesNoYes/YesYes/YesMDS 9222i
FC
FCIP
iSCSI
FICON
YesYesYesYes/YesYes/Yes
MDS
9506/9509/9513
Director
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FC
FCIP
SN8000C
Supervisor 2A
iSCSI
C-series FICON directors 57