User Manual v12.3.0 User Manual

Brocade Network Advisor SAN User Manual 1017

53-1003154-01

Chapter

FICON Environments

In this chapter

•FICON configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1017

•Configuring a switch for FICON operation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1018

•Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1025

•Configuring an Allow/Prohibit Matrix manually . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1027

•Saving or copying Allow/Prohibit Matrix configurations to another device 1028

•Activating an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1031

•Deleting an Allow/Prohibit Matrix configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032

•Changing the Allow/Prohibit Matrix display . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1032

•Cascaded FICON fabric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1033

•Cascaded FICON fabric merge . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1036

•Port groups. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1041

•Swapping blades . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1044

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 460 and Figure 461 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 Channel-to-Channel (CTC) except under

special circumstances.

FIGURE 460 Cascaded configuration, two domains