Q-Logic 5000 manual Device Access

3 – Planning Device Access

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3.2

Device Access

Consider device access needs within the fabric. Access is controlled by the use of zoning. Some zoning strategies include the following:

„Separate devices by operating system.

„Separate devices that have no need to communicate with other devices in the fabric or have classified data.

„Separate devices into department, administrative, or other functional group.

„Reserve a path and its bandwidth from one port to another.

Zoning divides the fabric for purposes of controlling discovery and inbound traffic. A zone is a named group of ports or devices. Members of the same zone can communicate with each other and transmit outside the zone, but cannot receive inbound traffic from outside the zone. A port/device can be a member of up to eight zones whose combined membership does not exceed 64.

Zoning is hardware enforced on a switch port if the sum of the logged-in devices plus the devices zoned with devices on that port is 64 or less. If a port exceeds this sum, that port behaves as a soft zone member. The port continues to behave as a soft zone member until the sum of logged-in and zoned devices falls back to 64, and the port is reset.

A zone can be a component of more than one zone set. Several zone sets can be defined for a fabric, but only one zone set can be active at one time. The active zone set determines the current fabric zoning.

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