HP Mainframe Connectivity Design Guide

1 FICON SAN design overview
SANs provide the data communication infrastructure for advanced, cost-efficient storage systems.
SAN technology offers investment protection, management features, and I/O price performance
to minimize capital expense. HP SAN architecture provides open network storage solutions for all
sizes and types of businesses, including small to medium-sized IT departments and enterprise
environments.
The IBM implementation of ESCON channel programs over Fibre Channel is called FICON.
FICON SAN solutions
FICON SANs provide flexibility in system management, configuration, connectivity, and performance
to meet the needs of the changing business environment. When properly designed and implemented,
FICON SANs offer resilient solutions.
• Business continuance
SANs can eliminate single points of failure, incorporate failover paths, and support mirroring
at geographically dispersed data centers for disaster recovery. You can quickly restore
productivity after a power failure or component downtime.
• High availability
Redundant fabric designs, storage replication, multiple paths, dynamic failover protection,
and traffic rerouting enable SANs to provide enterprise-class availability to storage devices
and other peripherals.
• Server and storage consolidation
Multiple mainframes or applications can share storage for efficient processing and increased
availability.
• Fast backup and restore
Multiple mainframes or applications can share centrally managed, high-performance tape
libraries to reduce backup overhead and use tape storage resources efficiently.
• Cost savings
SAN total cost of ownership is typically less than DAS. The business realizes a higher return
on investment because sharing storage among mainframes utilizes capacity more efficiently,
and expenses for backup hardware are reduced. Increased system availability can help
prevent costly downtime and lost data.
• Centralized management
You can manage consolidated FICON storage and SANs by using web-based or
mainframe-based tools, thus reducing labor costs.
• Security
SANs support network security measures, such as authentication, authorization, access control,
and zoning.
• Online scalability
You can add storage capacity or expand the fabric as needs change. You can add and
remove servers, and increase, change, or reassign storage while the SAN is online.
8 FICON SAN design overview