in one zone and the rest appear in another zone. Members of a zone can only communicate with other members in the zone. If two elements are not within the same zone, they cannot communicate.

Zones are usually created for a particular task, such as controlling access between devices or groups. You might create zones based on an application or an operating system. For example, some network administrators prefer to put all of the Microsoft Windows computers in one zone and all of the Sun Solaris computers in another. As mentioned previously, you can create zones according to an application. For example, you might want to create a zone for production and another zone for finance. This way the users in the finance department are not even aware of the disks and ports available for production and vice versa.

As shown in the following figure, ports 1 through 5 on the switch are assigned to a zone for production and ports 4 through 8 are assigned to the zone for the finance department. Users in the finance department can access storage systems B and C but not storage system A. Likewise, users in the production department can access storage systems A and C, but not storage system B. The following figure is an example of switch port zoning because the zones are assigned to ports on a switch.

Figure 52 Resources in Two Zones

Only elements in an active zone set can communicate with each other. When a zone set is not active, it does not have any effect. If we do not want users in the Production and Finance zones to have access to the same storage, these two zones must be in two different zone sets, which must be both active. Since you can only have one active zone set to a fabric, the Production zone belongs to a zone set in one fabric and the Finance zone belongs to another zone set in another fabric.

A zone can be in more than one zone set. For example, the Finance zone could be in an active and inactive zone set. This allows for more flexibility. For example assume the Finance zone is a member of an active zone set named Zone Set One and a member of an inactive zone set named Zone Set Two in the same fabric. Zone Set Two contains additional zones. Assume you want to make users

Storage Essentials 5.00.01 User Guide 299