IBM FlashSystem 840 Product Guide
8
Four Gbps and 8 Gbps Fibre Channel connections are supported on the same system connecting to
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16 Gbps devices, but there are still only a total of eight available active ports (ports 1 and 2 on each
interface card). For example, an IBM FlashSystem 840 system can have four Fibre Channel
connections at 16 Gbps and four Fibre Channel connections at 8 Gbps.
Fibre Channel interfaces support Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) only, with point-to-point (FC-P2P),
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arbitrated loop (FC-AL), and switched fabric (FC-SW) topologies. FC interfaces can be configured as
N_port or NL_port types. It should be noted that FC-AL is not supported for ports connected at 16
Gbps.
Full active-active multipathing across all interfaces is supported. Host software support for this
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function might vary.
Fibre Channel over Ethernet support
FlashSystem 840 supports 16 ports of 10 Gbps Fibre Channel over Ethernet. FCoE uses the same
interface cards as FC.
Fibre Channel and FCoE Interface Cards
Each FlashSystem 840 canister supports two Fibre Channel (FC) interface cards for a total of four FC
interface cards, 8 Gbps FC cards support four ports, 16 Gbps cards support two ports.
Table 2 shows the supported interface cards.
Table 2.
FC/FCoE supported interface cards
Item
Feature code
Ports
FC/FCoE Host Interface Card
AF15
Corequisites:
AF18, AF19, or AF1A
-Up to 16 ports of 8 Gbps Fibre
Channel (with AF18)
-Up to eight ports of 16 Gbps Fibre
Channel (with AF19)
-Up to 16 ports of 10 Gbps Fibre
Channel over Ethernet (with AF1A)
8 Gb FC 8 Port Host Optics
AF18
Up to 16 ports of 8 Gbps Fibre
Channel
16 Gb FC 4 Port Host Optics
AF19
Up to eight ports of 16 Gbps Fibre
Channel
10 Gb FCoE 8 Port Host Optics
AF1A
Up to 16 ports of 10 Gbps Fibre
Channel over Ethernet
iSCSI interface card
FlashSystem 840 supports 16 ports of 10 Gbps iSCSI for clients looking for alternatives to SANs. The
iSCSI interface card looks similar to the FC/FCoE cards with Fibre optical connections as shown in the
previous Figure 5.
Table 3 shows the supported iSCSI interface card and port optics.
Table 3. iSCSI supported interface cards
Item
Feature code
Ports
iSCSI Host Interface Card
AF17 (Corequisite : AF1D)
Up to 16 ports of 10 Gbps iSCSI
10 Gb iSCSI 8 Port Host Optics
AF1D
Up to 16 ports of 10 Gbps iSCSI
