FW 05.01.00 and SW 07.01.00 HP StorageWorks SAN High Availability Planning Guide (AA-RS2DC-TE, June 2003)

Introduction to HP Fibre Channel Products
16 SAN High Availability Planning Guide
■ Arbitrated loop switches — Fibre Channel arbitrated loop (FC-AL) switches
are low port count, low-bandwidth products. HP offers related products that
act as loop-switching hubs and fabric-attach switches. These switches provide
connectivity between attached FC-AL devices, and between FC-AL devices
and switched fabric elements. This connectivity allows low-cost or
low-bandwidth workgroup (edge) devices to communicate with fabric devices
(servers, storage devices, or other peripherals), and ultimately be incorporated
into an enterprise SAN environment.
Directors and switches are managed and controlled through a High Availability
Fabric Manager (HAFM) server, available from HP with the HAFM, Director 2/64
Product Manager, Director 2/140 Product Manager, Edge Switch 2/16 Product
Manager, Edge Switch 2/24 Product Manager, and Edge Switch 2/32 Product
Manager applications installed. The HAFM server is a notebook personal
computer (PC) that provides a central point of control for up to 48 managed
products (directors and switches).
Managed products and the HAFM server communicate on a local area network
(LAN) through one or more HP-supplied 10/100 Base-T Ethernet hubs. Hubs are
daisy-chained as required to provide additional Ethernet connections as more
directors or switches are installed on a customer network.
Refer to Chapter 2 for information about managing products through the HAFM
server. Chapter 2 also describes switch management through simple network
management protocol (SNMP) workstations, through the Internet using an
Embedded Web Server (EWS) interface installed on the product, and through
inband (Fibre Channel) application clients.
Directors and switches can be configured to order in an HP-supplied 19-inch
equipment rack. Figure 1 on page 17 illustrates an equipment rack.