HP Fibre Channel Mass Storage Adapters Support Guide, February 2007

Appendix C

Additional Features

Fibre Channel SNIA HBA API

Software applications managing SANs require information from host bus adapters (HBAs) to operate. Every

vendor, operating system, and platform provides HBA information differently.

The HP Fibre Channel Storage Network Industry Association Host Bus Adapter Application Programming

Interface (FC SNIA HBA API) is a C library interface that was created to provide a common HBA API library

for all Fibre Channel HBA vendors, and a vendor specific API library for HP supported Fibre Channel

adapters. The API is part of the driver software. It is loaded when you install the driver.

HP created the FC SNIA HBA API for programmers who want to use this API to write applications for

managing SANs. This API can be used with the Fibre Channel host bus adapters using the FCD driver.

At a high level, the common HBA library handles multiple vendor implementations of the API by dynamically

loading libraries. At a lower level, a vendor-provided library provides vendor-specific implementations of the

API.

The FC SNIA HBA API supports multithreading and OLAR on OLAR supported platforms and adapters.

The Fibre Channel SNIA HBA API Programmer's Guide is available at:

http://docs.hp.com/en/netcom.html#Fibre%20Channel

It is also available on the HP-UX Instant Information CD delivered with your HP-UX product updates.