Shared infrastructure, Native Ficon Channels

links deﬁ ned on the FICON Express SX channel cards are up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) and 250 meters (820 feet) for 50 and 62.5 micron multimode ﬁ ber, respectively. The maximum unrepeated distances for 2 Gbps links deﬁ ned on the FICON Express SX channel cards are up to 300 meters and 120 meters for 50 and 62.5 micron multimode

ﬁber, respectively. The FICON Express channel cards are designed to reduce the data droop effect that made long distances not viable for ESCON. This distance capability is becoming increasingly important as enterprises are moving toward remote I/O, vaulting for disaster recovery and Geographically Dispersed Parallel Sysplex™ for availability.

Shared infrastructure

FICON (FC-SB-2 Fibre Channel Single-Byte Command Code Set-2) has been adopted by INCITS (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) as a standard to the Fibre Channel Architecture. Using open connectivity standards leads to shared I/O ﬁ ber cabling and switch infrastructures, facilitated data sharing, storage management and SAN implementation, and integration between the mainframe and UNIX®/Intel® technologies.

Native FICON Channels

Native FICON channels and devices can help to reduce bandwidth constraints and channel contention to enable easier server consolidation, new application growth, large business intelligence queries and exploitation of e-business.

Currently, the IBM TotalStorage® Enterprise Storage Server® (ESS) Models F10, F20 and 800 have two host adapters to support native FICON. These host adapters each have one port per card and can either be FC 3021 for long

wavelength or FC 3032 for short wavelength on the F10/ F20, or FC 3024 for long wavelength and 3025 for short wavelength on the 800. All three models can support up to 16 FICON ports per ESS. The Model 800 is 2 Gb link capable. The IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Tape Control- ler 3590 Model A60 provides up to two FICON interfaces which can coexist with ESCON on the same box. Enter- prise Tape Controller 3592-J70 provides up to four FICON interfaces, which can exist with ESCON on the same box. The 3592-J70 is designed to provide up to 1.5 times the throughput of the Model A60. Customers can utilize IBM’s highest capacity, highest performance tape drive to sup- port their new business models.

Many Fibre Channel directors provide dynamic connectiv- ity to native FICON control units. The IBM 2032 models 001, 064 and 140 (resell of the McDATA ED-5000, and Intrepid 6000 Series Directors) are 32-, 64- and 140-port high availability directors. The IBM 2042 Models 001, 128 and 256 (resell of the CNT FC/9000 Directors) are 64-,

128- and 256-port high availability directors. All have fea- tures that provide interface support to allow the unit to be managed by System Automation for OS/390. The McDATA Intrepid 6000 Series Directors and CNT FC/9000 Directors support 2 Gbps link data rates as well.

The FICON Express features now support attachment to the IBM M12 Director (2109-M12). The IBM M12 Director supports attachment of FICON Express channels on the z990 via native FICON (FC CHPID type) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP CHPID type) supporting attachment to SCSI disks in Linux environments.