Brocade SAN Glossary for Fabric OS v6.0.0

Brocade SAN Glossary 1/29/2008 Page 2 of 29
Administrative Domain (AD)
Part of Brocade’s virtual fabric strategy, a filtered administrative view of the
fabric. The logical view presented in an AD filters attributes of switch ports
and end devices based on AD membership. ADs allow device resources in a
fabric to be grouped together and provide the ability to manage them
separately.
Advanced zoning In EZSwitchSetup, a zoning option that allows you to customize zoning and is
appropriate for SAN administrators who have the experience to perform
manual zoning.
Alias server A proposed standard as part of FC-GS-3; it will use the well-known address
FFFFF8 and will maintain identifier mappings to support multicast group
management
AL_PA Arbitrated Loop Physical Address. An 8-bit value used to identify a device
participating in an Arbitrated Loop.
AL_TIME Arbitrated Loop Timeout value. Twice the amount of time it would take for a
transmission word to propagate around a worst-case loop. The default value
is 15 milliseconds (ms).
ANSI American National Standards Institute. Governing body for standards
in the U.S.
ARB Arbitrative Primitive Signal. Applies only to an Arbitrated Loop topology, and
is transmitted as the fill word by an L_Port to indicate the port is arbitrating
access to the loop.
Arbitrated Loop A shared 100/200-megabytes-per-second Fibre Channel transport
supporting up to a maximum of 126 devices and 1 attachment to a fabric.
Ports with lower AL_PAs have higher priorities.
Arbitration A method of gaining orderly access to a shared-loop topology.
ARP Address Resolution Protocol. A TCP/IP function for associating an IP address
with a link-level address.
ASIC Application-Specific Integrated Circuit.
ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A high-speed packet-switching transport used
for transmitting data over LANs or WANs that transmits fixed-length units of
data. It provides any-to-any connectivity and nodes can transmit
simultaneously.
Audit event Fabric OS event that is logged.
Authentication The process of verifying through a password that an entity in a fabric, such
as a switch, should or should not have access to the fabric.
Autoleveling A process run on embedded switches (also called “blades”) that is triggered
when the active CP detects that the blade contains a different version of the
firmware, regardless of which version is older. Autoleveling downloads the
firmware to the embedded switch, swaps partitions, reboots the switch, and
copies the new firmware from the primary partition to the secondary
partition.