Can you use persistent binding in FC-AL? It would seem to be a good thing as it is possible to change the target address of a disk controller by adding another disk controller to a loop and following it up with a boot-r in Solaris.

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

I assume the binding in question is the physical address binding for loop communications. The LIP (loop initialization process) for FC loops is defined to make several passes based on a number of criteria for establishing addresses on the loop. As far as I know there are no ways to guarantee a persistent address can be kept as the algorithms used in LIPs are designed to resolve conflicts that could occur.

From a practical perspective, if you connect the loop to a switch and the loop devices all the public loop spec, the switch will maintain the address mapping for all loop devices. Still, this cannot guarantee persistent address binding for all cases.

Regards,
Marc

Editor's note: Do you agree with this expert's response? If you have more to share, post it in our Storage Networking discussion forum.

This was first published in March 2002

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top