FlashSystem 900 Product Guide
9
Fibre Channel support
The Fibre Channel and FCoE protocols use the same interface cards. However, only one protocol is
supported per IBM FlashSystem 900 enclosure. Figure 6 shows the Fibre Channel interface card.
Figure 6. Fibre Channel interface card ( example shows a 16 Gbps Fibre Channel card )
IBM FlashSystem 900 supports the 16 Gbps Fibre Channel connection speed through the standard Fibre
Channel interface card.
Here are the rules for supporting 16 Gbps Fibre Channel on IBM FlashSystem 900:
If you use 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, only two (of the four) ports on the Fibre Channel modules can be
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used. The two left-most ports (1 and 2) on each interface card are used for 16 Gbps support. If your
system is configured for 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, only the two leftmost ports (1 and 2) per interface
adapter are used. The other two ports are disabled.
If you use 16 Gbps Fibre Channel, all four of the Fibre Channel modules are configured for 16 Gbps.
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This configuration supports a total of eight Fibre Channel ports for the system (2 ports x 4 interface
cards)
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 900 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.
