7.5.1 Attaching to an Open System host

Fibre Channel technology supports increased performance, scalability, availability, and distance for attaching storage subsystems to servers as compared to SCSI attachments. Fibre Channel technology supports sharing of large amounts of disk storage between many servers.

Fibre Channel ports on the DS6000 can be shared between different Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and operating systems. For more information about supported host systems, operating system levels, host bus adapters, and fabric support, see the Interoperability Matrix at:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/interop.html

Attention: SCSI adapters are not available on the DS6000.

7.5.2 FICON-attached zSeries Host

The DS6000 series supports FICON-attached zSeries hosts.

The storage unit attaches to S/390 and zSeries host systems with FICON channels. Each of the four Fibre Channel ports on each controller can be configured to operate in FICON mode. When configured for FICON, the Fibre Channel port supports connections to a maximum of 128 FICON hosts. When you configure a FICON port on one of the two controller cards, you should also configure a FICON port on the second controller card to allow failover from one server to the other to work. A FICON port on the DS6000 can be connected directly to a zSeries host or to a SAN switch supporting FICON connections. With Fibre Channel adapters configured for FICON, the storage unit supports the following:

￿Either fabric or point-to-point topologies

￿A maximum of 128 host connections per Fibre Channel port

￿A maximum of 32 logical subsystems

￿A maximum of 8192 logical volumes

￿A maximum of 1024 logical paths per FICON port

The storage unit supports the following operating systems for zSeries hosts:

￿Transaction Processing Facility (TPF)

￿Virtual Storage Extended/Enterprise Storage Architecture (VSE/ESA)

￿z/OS

￿z/VM

Note, that Linux on zSeries currently supports only FCP-attached disks and not

FICON-attached disks.

FICON is an optional feature on the DS6800 system, and is available with the FICON Attachment feature number 5915.

For details about models, versions of operating systems, and releases that the storage unit supports for these host systems, see the Interoperability Matrix at:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/interop.html

Attention: The DS6000 series does not support ESCON attachment.

Chapter 7. Installation planning

123

Page 147
Image 147
IBM DS6000 Series manual Attaching to an Open System host, FICON-attached zSeries Host, 123