User`s guide

1 – Introduction
What is Fibre Channel?
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1.3
What is Fibre Channel?
Fibre Channel technology is outlined in the SCSI-3 Fibre Channel Protocol
(SCSI-FCP) standard. Fibre Channel is a high-speed data transport technology
used for mass storage and networking. It connects mainframes, super computers,
workstations, storage devices, and servers.
Fibre Channel supports data transfer rates up to 200 MBps half-duplex and
400 MBps full-duplex on copper and optical interfaces. The QLA23xx HBAs use a
multimode optical interface for intermediate distances (less than 500 meters at the
data rate of 1 Gbps; less than 300 meters at the data rate of 2 Gbps).
With its increased connectivity and performance, Fibre Channel is the I/O
technology preferred and used by system designers.
1.4
Features
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Compliance with PCI Local Bus Specification revision 2.2
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Compliance with PCI-X Addendum (revision 1.0) to the PCI Local Bus
Specification
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Compliance with Third Generation Fibre Channel-Physical and Signaling
Interface (FC-PH-3) standard
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Compliance with Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL-2) standard
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Compliance with U.S. and international safety and emissions standards
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Support for bus master DMA
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Fast!UTIL BIOS utility to customize the configuration parameters on the
QLA23xx HBA and attached drives
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Two independent channels on a single HBA: QLA2342/2342L
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Four independent channels on a single HBA: QLA2344
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Supports Fibre Channel protocol-SCSI (FCP-SCSI) and IP
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Supports point-to-point fabric connection (F-PORT FABRIC LOGIN)
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Supports Fibre Channel security protocol (FC-SP) using DH-CHAP (Solaris
SPARC 2.6, 7, 8, and 9 only)
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Supports fabric device management interface (FDMI) on the following operating
systems: Windows 2000; Windows Server 2003; Red Hat Linux 8 and 9,
Advanced Server 2.1; SuSE SLES 8; Solaris 2.6, 7, 8 and 9
Using FDMI, storage area network (SAN) administrators can view device-specific
information (for example, driver version, firmware version, and model number)
from a central console, regardless of the device manufacturer. This information