Brocade Network Advisor SAN User Manual v11.1x (53-1002167-01, May 2011)

Brocade Network Advisor IP User Manual 705

53-1002168-01

Chapter

FICON Environments

In this chapter

•FICON Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 705

•Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 706

•Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix manually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 707

•Saving or Copying Allow/Prohibit Matrix configurations to another device 709

•Activating an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711

•Deleting an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 712

•Changing the Allow/Prohibit Matrix display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 713

•Cascaded FICON fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 714

•Cascaded FICON fabric merge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 716

•Port Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 720

•Swapping blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 723

FICON Configurations

IBM Fibre Connection (FICON) is a protocol used between IBM (and compatible) mainframes and

storage. FICON configurations can be categorized into three types, based on complexity:

• Point-to-point configurations that do not use a switch.

• Switched point-to-point configurations, also called single switch configurations, connect a host

channel to a storage control unit using a single switch. In this type of configuration, the

channel is configured to use single-byte addressing.

• Cascaded configurations, also called high integrity fabrics, connect host channels and storage

control units that reside in different domains. Cascaded FICON fabrics must be configured as

high integrity fabrics. In this type of configuration, the channel is configured to use two-byte link

addressing. Figure 325 and Figure 326 are examples of cascaded FICON configurations. IBM

does not support configurations that have more than two domains in a path from a FICON

Channel interface to a FICON Control Unit interface to CTC except under special circumstances.

FIGURE 325 Cascaded configuration, two domains