Technical data

Glossary-2 Fabric OS Administrator’s Guide
Publication Number: 53-0000518-09
area number In Brocade Fabric OS v4.0.0 and above, ports on a switch are assigned a logical area number. Port area
numbers can be viewed by entering the switchshow command. They are used to define the operative
port for many Fabric OS commands: for example, area numbers can be used to define the ports within
an alias or zone.
ARR Asynchronous response router. Refers to Management Server GS_Subtype Code E4, which appears in
portlogdump command output.
ASD Alias server daemon. Used for managing multicast groups by supporting the create, add, remove, and
destroy functions.
ASIC Application-specific integrated circuit. [Necessary? Basic. –ed.]
ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A transport used for transmitting data over LANs or WANs that transmit
fixed-length units of data. Provides any-to-any connectivity and allows nodes to transmit
simultaneously.
authentication The process of verifying that an entity in a fabric (such as a switch) is what it claims to be. See also
“digital certificate”, “switch-to-switch authentication”.
autocommit A feature of the firmwaredownload command. Enabled by default, autocommit commits new
firmware to both partitions of a control processor.
autoreboot Refers to the -b option of the firmwaredownload command. Enabled by default.
B
BB_Credit Buffer-to-buffer credit. The number of frames that can be transmitted to a directly connected recipient
or within an arbitrated loop. Determined by the number of receive buffers available. See also “buffer-to-
buffer flow control”.
beacon A tool in which all of the port LEDs on a switch are set to flash from one side of the switch to the other,
to enable identification of an individual switch in a large fabric. A switch can be set to beacon by a CLI
command or through Brocade Web Tools.
beginning
running
disparity
The disparity at the transmitter or receiver when the special character associated with an ordered set is
encoded or decoded. See also “disparity”.
BIST Built-in self-test.
bit
synchroniza-
tion
The condition in which a receiver is delivering retimed serial data at the required bit error rate.
block As it applies to Fibre Channel technology, upper-level application data that is transferred in a single
sequence.
bloom The code name given to the third-generation Brocade Fabric ASIC.