Brocade FICON Administrator's Guide v7.1.0 (53-1002753-01, March 2013)

FICON Administrator’s Guide 1
53-1002753-01
Chapter
1
Introducing FICON
•FICON overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
•FICON concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
•FICON configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
•Access control in FICON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
•FICON commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
•Link and FC addressing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
FICON overview
IBM Fibre Connection (FICON
®
) is an industry-standard, high-speed input/output (I/O) interface for
mainframe connections to storage devices. This guide discusses support offered by Fabric OS in
intermix mode operations, in which FICON and Fibre Channel technology work together.
For specific information about intermix mode and other aspects of FICON, refer to the IBM
Redbook, FICON® Implementation Guide (SG24-6497-01), and Implementing an IBM/Brocade
SAN with 8 Gbps Directors and Switches (SG24-6116-08).
NOTE
In this guide, the term switch is used to refer to a Brocade switch, Backbone, or backbone platform
unless otherwise noted.
Fabric OS support for FICON
The following Fabric OS standard features support FICON fabrics:
• Blade swapping
Allows you to swap a blade of the same type so that you can perform a FRU replacement with
minimal traffic disruption. This feature is available for both FICON
and open system
environments. Blade swapping resolves situations in which the hardware has failed and the
channel configurations cannot be changed quickly. In addition, a blade swap minimizes and
eliminates the need to make changes to the I/O sysgen in the hardware configuration
definition (HCD). Blade swapping has minimal or no impact on other switch features.
• Routing policies
FICON does not support exchange based routing, but does support port based and device
based routing. For details on these policies, refer to the “Routing Traffic” chapter in the
Brocade Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide.
• FICON MIB module
Addresses link incident data for FICON hosts and devices connected to a switch. It
supplements other MIBs used to manage switches and should be used in conjunction with
those other MIBs. For more information, refer to the Fabric OS MIB Reference.