Glossary

Fibre Channel (FC)

An ANSI T11 standard which provides high-speed, high-reliability data transfers among computing devices, storage devices, and networked equipment. It defines a bi-directional, full-duplex serial data channel at speeds of 1 Gigabit per second and higher, over distances up to 30 km. Current implementations support the transport of SCSI and IP protocols over switched and loop network topologies.

Fibre Channel Address

A 3-byte address defining a destination or source node (N_Port, NL_Port, etc.) There are 256 ports within each Area (only half of which are usable on FC-AL), 256 Areas within each Domain, and 256 Domains.

Table 7: Fibre Channel Address

Bits 23-16

Bits 15-8

Bits 7-0

 

 

 

 

 

 

Domain Address

Area Address

Loop Address

 

 

 

Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL)

A Fibre Channel workgroup topology supporting up to 126 devices without the use of fabric protocols. Media access is performed through arbitration. Switching and fabric features can be supported through the use of infrastructure products such as hubs, switches, bridges, routers, and embedded management agents and services.

F_Port

Fabric Port. A port on a fabric switch to which N_Ports may be directly connected. The F_Port is not capable of communicating with FC-AL protocol.

FL_Port

Fabric Loop Port. An F_Port that is capable of supporting an attached Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop. An FL_Port on a loop will have the AL_PA hex’00’ giving the fabric the highest priority access to the loop. N_Ports or NL_Ports can attach to it in an Arbitrated Loop topology and are capable of communicating with FC-AL protocol.

FPGA

Field Programmable Gate Array is a hardware device to which you download code that determines the set of capabilities for that device.

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HP P4459A manual Fpga