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Preliminary
Major Fibre Channel Port Features
SANbox-16HA Fibre Channel Switch
Installer’s/User’s Manual 59005-03 Rev. A General Description 1-3
• You may populate 2 to 16 ports with GBICs. The choice of ports and GBICs
is yours.
The Switch has been validated with GBICs that support a variety of intercon-
nection media. Refer to “Fibre Channel Ports” on page 1-17 for more infor-
mation.
Fabric Port Overview
All ports on the SANbox-16HA chassis are “Loop-aware” FL_Ports. That is, they
are ports that are able to discover, through the Fibre Channel Fabric Login process,
whether they should function as an F_Port (communicating with an N_Port) or as a
Fabric Loop port (communicating with an Node Loop Port (NL_Port)). Fabric
ports connect to Public devices that conform to the Fibre Channel Standards.
Switch management allows you to force a fabric port to function as an F_Port.
Refer to the Switch Management manual for more information.
The attributes of F_Ports and FL_Ports are described in the Fibre Channel
Standards.
Segmented Loop Port (SL_Port) Overview
You may use Switch management to configure any or all ports on the SANbox-16
chassis as Segmented Loop ports (SL_Ports). SL_Ports connect to devices which
conform to the Fibre Channel-Private Loop SCSI Direct Attach (FC-PLDA)
standard. SL_Ports allow you to divide these Private Loops into multiple segments
which may communicate through the Switch as though they were all part of the
same Private Loop.
A Segmented Loop has greater performance than an un-segmented loop because a
Segmented Loop can have multiple concurrent frame transfers (one per loop
segment) while an un-segmented loop can have only one.