HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

For more information, see “FICON and Fibre Channel intermix guidelines” (page 156).
• 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).
• 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.
• 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 blades, or across different blades.
The following McDATA FICON features require optional licenses:
• ISL trunking—Combines multiple ISLs into one ISL, enabling trunking between two directors.
The total bandwidth is a combination of the ISLs in the trunk. Load sharing and balancing
occurs automatically across ISLs. This ensures guaranteed in-order delivery of FICON frames.
• NPIV—N_Port ID Virtualization, which allows multiple Linux logical partitions to share an FCP
channel.
• FICON management server—Required for CUP, which enables the mainframe to monitor and
manage the director.
• Secure binding—Allows you to configure fabric, director, or port binding. Secure binding is
included with the Mi10K, but is an optional license for the M6140 and M4700.
◦ Fabric binding (recommended for FICON) ensures that ISLs are enabled only between
directors authorized in the fabric binding configuration. This prevents unauthorized
directors from joining the fabric or disrupting fabric operations.
◦ Director binding and port binding are not recommended for FICON fabrics.
• SANtegrity—Required to support 2-byte destination link addressing or cascaded directors.
SANtegrity is included with the Mi10K, but is an optional license for the M6140 and M4700.
NOTE: Enterprise Fabric Mode is an optional license. You must disable the rerouting delay,
which is not supported with FICON.
Table 26 (page 66) compares the high-availability features of the McDATA FICON directors.
Table 26 McDATA FICON director high-availability feature comparison
Redundant
nl
Nondisruptive
port expansion
Nondisruptive
code activation
Redundant
control
nl
Redundant/
nl
hot-swappable
cooling
Redundant/
nl
hot-swappable
powerModel
active
nl
componentsprocessor
YesYesYesYesYes/YesYes/YesM6064
YesYesYesYesYes/YesYes/YesM6140
NoYesYesNoYes/YesYes/YesM4700
YesYesYesYesYes/YesYes/YesMi10K
66 McDATA FICON directors and fabric rules