HP A7533A - Brocade 4Gb SAN Switch Base, Administrator'S Manual

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Fabric OS 6.2 administrator guide 371
A simple metaSAN can be constructed using an FC router to connect two or more separate fabrics.
Additional FC routers can be used to increase the available bandwidth between fabrics and to provide
redundancy.
Figure 61 shows a metaSAN consisting of a host in Edge SAN 1 connected to storage in Edge SAN 2
through a backbone fabric connecting two FC routers.
Figure 61 Edge SANs connected through a backbone fabric
• Phantom domains
A phantom domain is a domain emulated by the Fibre Channel router. The FC router can emulate two
types of phantom domains: front phantom domains and translate phantom domains. For detailed
information about phantom domains, see ” Phantom domains ” on page 372.
Proxy devices
An FC router achieves interfabric device connectivity by creating proxy devices (hosts and targets) in
attached fabrics that represent real devices in other fabrics. For example, a host in Fabric 1 can
communicate with a target in Fabric 2 as follows:
• A proxy target in Fabric 1 represents the real target in Fabric 2.
• Likewise, a proxy host in Fabric 2 represents the real host in Fabric 1.
The host discovers and sends Fibre Channel frames to the proxy target. The FC router receives these frames,
translates them appropriately, and then delivers them to the destination fabric for delivery to the target.
The target responds by sending frames to the proxy host. Hosts and targets are exported from the edge
SAN to which they are attached and, correspondingly, imported into the edge SAN reached through Fibre
Channel routing. Figure 62 illustrates this concept.
= LSAN
Edge SAN 2 Edge SAN 1
Backbone
fabric
FC router FC router
E_Port
E_Port
IFL IFL
EX_Port
EX_Port
ISL