FC-AL topology in a SAN environment

What is the FC-AL topology in a SAN environment?

Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) is an early shared access, shared bandwidth topology with devices attached via a hub or connected via loop or ring, similar to a token ring network.

FC-AL for the most part has been replaced by switched Fibre Channel (FC-SW) for server attachment with some legacy...

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storage devices still supporting loop attachment provided by some switches. Some storage systems still utilize loop attachment of disk drives to storage controllers with servers attaching via FC-SW. However the trend is to move from FC-AL based "back-end" storage to some form of switched "back-end" disk drives on storage systems.

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