SAN/fiber channel and network subsystem

[Ahmed ABDOU_1]

In HPUX which uses FC HBA to connect to storage by switches formulatin a SAN, My questions are:
1. Is the UNIX netwroking subsystem related to this SAN, in other words, In single user mode network subsystem is down, will SAN be up and could be seen by ioscan?
2. What is the WWN?
3. What is the major difference between arbitated and switched Fabric topolgy?
4. What is CISF which is used in NAS?

[Bill McNAMARA_1]

it'd be pretty hard to boot your system into single user mode if your boot disk was on your SAN eh!

Worldwide name is like a mac address except for storage devices. it is the layer to which the loop id binds.. unique for all devices.

see http://www.fibrechannel.org/

Have never worked with NAS......

Later,
Bill

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi

Hope I understand your quesiions correct.

1 Networking (LAN) and SAN are different. You can use a SAN disk for booting (also in single user mode) and do ioscan etc.

2 See Bills answere.
3 Some answeres in thihttp://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xe9f9227a4bc6d611abdb0090277a778c,00.htmls thread:

4 Common Internet FileSystem (I think). This is a Microsoft standard.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Sorry,

Something got wrong with the link:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xe9f9227a4bc6d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html


If you want more information about CIFS:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/release.asp?releaseid=37530

[Ashwani Kashyap · Accepted solution]

1. Unix networking subsystem is not rlated to SAN . Networking uses TCP/IP stack , whereas SAN uses Fibre channel protocol . Basically it transfers SCSI commands and controls over fibre channel .

2. World Wide name of an HBA . Its unique to each HBA . Its similar th the MAC address of a NIC card . Do /opt/fsmc/bin/fcmsutil /dev/td0 to get the wwn number of your HBA .

3. Arbritated loop topology is a communication path way which connects the components of a system through a loop . Only one device can talk to aother at a time and communication control is arbitrated . Onlly limited number of devices can be in a loop . Older equipments i.e older than 2-3 years use this topology .

Switched fabric or fabric topology supports multiple concurrent point to point connections . This topology can support upto 16 million addresses .

4. I have no idea .

[Ashwani Kashyap]

OK here is the reply for 4th question .

4. I think you menat CIFS which is Common Internet File Systems . This is the new protocol for Network File systems usually used to mount file systems from one OS to another OS.

An addendum to your first question :

Yes you could boot from a SAN device and also you could see SAN devices in single user mode . All you got to make sure is your HBA drivers are up and running .

[Vincent Fleming]

CIFS is indeed the "Common Internet File Sysytem", by Microsoft, and is the Windoze equivelent of NFS for UNIX. The two are incompatible with each other.

Windoze out-of-the-box will talk CIFS, but not NFS. UNIX will talk both in most versions, but it's implemented as 2 different sets of software (NFS daemons and CIFS (SAMBA) daemons). There is NFS available for Windoze, from several software vendors, including Microsoft.

Good luck!