Specifications
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2003. All rights reserved. 1
Chapter 1. Introduction
McDATA Intrepid FICON Directors are a product of a reseller agreement between IBM and 
McDATA Corporation. They are designed to provide enterprise-class availability and Fibre 
Channel connectivity for IBM servers and storage products supporting Fibre Channel (FC) 
and FICON protocols.
The intent of this chapter is to provide background information about the zSeries FICON 
environment in which McDATA Intrepid FICON Directors are deployed. In the subsequent 
sections, you will find the following:
 Basic FICON and Fibre Channel terms
 FICON overview
– FICON channel support
 Supported FICON Director topologies:
– Switched point-to-point 
– Cascaded FICON Directors
– High integrity
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