Chapter 1. Overview of the IBM SAN48C-6 Fibre
Channel Switch
The IBM SAN48C-6 switch has 48 x 4/8/16/32 Gbps multispeed ports and is a powerful and compact 1-
rack unit (1RU) SAN fabric switch. This switch has the following major features:
• Provides consistent 32 Gbps quality performance for every Fibre Channel port on the switch.
• Port-channel link members can be used across the three 16 port port groups providing additional high
availability.
• Provides minimum configuration option of twenty four 32 Gbps Fibre Channel ports in the base variant,
which can be enabled in increments of 8 ports to up to 48 ports. This allows four possible configurations
of 24, 32, 40, and 48 ports.
• Supports enterprise-class features, such as Auto Zone, Smart Zoning, Slow Drain Detection and
Isolation, Virtual SAN (VSAN) and Inter-VSAN routing (IVR), and migration from fabric-wide Quality of
Service (QoS) from SAN islands to enterprise-wide storage networks.
• Provides intelligent diagnostics tools such as Inter-Switch Link (ISL) diagnostics, HBA diagnostics with
leading HBA vendors, read diagnostic parameters, protocol decoding, network analysis tools, and
integrated Call Home.
• Supports the Virtual Machine Identifier (VMID) feature that provides visibility into virtual machines that
are accessing the storage devices in the fabric.
• Supports Representational State Transfer (REST) and NX-API capabilities.
• Supports onboard hardware that protects the switch from malicious attacks by securing access to
critical components such as the bootloader, system image loader, and Joint Test Action Group (JTAG)
interface.
Switch Overview
Front View
The following figure shows the front view of a IBM SAN48C-6:
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