Do you practice single-initiator zoning?
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Overall, Storage readers are avid zoners. A survey last month revealed that
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88% of readers practice zoning of some sort or another. But readers are divided on single-initiator zoning (51% for, 49% against), where the number of HBAs in a zone is limited to one. One proponent of single-initiator zoning explained it this way: "The HBA in their respective servers don't need to talk to each other. Also, with one zone--one HBA policy, RSCNs [registered state change notifications] will not have any impact on the other servers if one of the servers in the fabric is rebooted." Not only that, writes one reader, "Some vendors only support single initiator zones." But for many readers, it's not worth the trouble: "Zones across large SANs can be an administrative nightmare." Performance can also be negatively impacted "if large zone sets are being pushed across ISLs."
This was first published in December 2003