Communicator e3000 MPE/iX Release 7.5 (Software Release C.75.00) (30216-90336)

Chapter 4

Fibre Channel Device and Adapter Support on HP e 3000 Systems

Fibre Channel Device Adapter Support

Introduction

With MPE/iX Release 7.5, support has been introduced for new Fibre Channel Device Adapter cards on

N-Class and A-Class HP e3000 systems. These PCI-bus based adapter cards provide the ability to connect a

Fibre Channel device directly to the HP e3000 system using Fibre channel cables. Prior to MPE/iX 7.5, HP

e3000 systems supported connectivity to fibre channel devices only through a SCSI-Fibre Channel Router

connected on a PCI-SCSI HVD card or NIO FW-SCSI card. Now with the support for Fibre Channel (FC)

adapter cards, the router is no longer needed for N- and A-class systems.

The Fibre Channel adapter cards require new software and new SYSGEN configuration values. The purpose

of this article is to provide an external “System Administrator” view of these changes in MPE/iX. The opening

section of the article describes the motive for supporting FC adapter cards. The next section gives details of

the new FC Device Adapter cards supported. The third section is a review of Fibre Channel Concepts (which

you may want to read first if all of this is new to you). The configuration of Fibre Channel adapter cards and

attached FC devices using SYSGEN is covered in a separate article in this Communicator.

NOTE Installation of HP e3000 Device adapter cards is to be performed by licensed HP Hardware

personnel only. All documents referred to in this article are available at http://docs.hp.com.

SCSI-FC Router vs. Fibre Channel Adapter

Prior to MPE/iX 7.5, fibre channel devices could be connected to N- and A-class HP e3000 systems only

through a SCSI-FC Router (A5814A-003). This router is a protocol converter between SCSI and Fibre

Channel. The SCSI-FC Router has one Ultra SCSI-HVD port and one Fibre Channel port. So a SCSI adapter

card on an HP e3000 can be connected to the SCSI-FC Router through a SCSI cable. On the other end of the

router, a FC cable connects to the FC device. This arrangement allows the HP e3000 system to access the FC

device through the router.

Figure 4-1 Accessing FC Device through SCSI-FC Router

Although this setup provided the capability for HP e3000 customers to connect FC devices, this arrangement

has multiple components and hence not easy to maintain. Since there are multiple connections, there can be

multiple points of failure possible. If there is a fault, it is necessary to individually check the SCSI adapter

card, SCSI cable, SCSI-FC router, FC cable and the FC device to see where the problem is. Thus using the

SCSI-FC router to access FC devices introduces multiple points of failure. Moreover accessing FC devices

through the router and SCSI cable brings down the high FC transfer rates ultimately to lower SCSI transfer

rates. Thus the FC storage devices are not getting used to their full performance capability. Also a “SCSI

view” of the FC device provided by the router limits the number of Logical Units (LUNs) that can be

SCSI cable

HP e3000

SCSI-FC Router

Device

FC cable