Hard and soft zonning

[Marvike]

Can any odne tell me what actually hard and soft zonning is.

[Uwe Zessin]

mostly history: hard-zoning is enforced in the switch's hardware and soft-zoning did filter the name server contents, but one could access a ressource by going directly to the Fibre Channel address.

The first-generation switches could not do hard-zoning for WWN-based zoning and this has stuck in many people's brain (and on many web pages ;-)

Sometimes this is painted like a security thing, but let's get real: in many cases the IT environment is under full control of the administrators, the vendor's device drivers do behave well and only a small amount of people can modify such software.

[Michal Kapalka (mikap)]

hi,

check this site :

"What are hard and soft zoning?"

http://www.sansecurity.com/faq/hard-soft-zoning.shtml

mikap

[Marcus Schack]

Also, you can check the current version of the SAN Design Guide where it talks about zoning. Look at document Part 5 Storage Security and Best Practices starting around page 421.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179911&taskId=101&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=406734

[Marvike]

Got required answer.