SAN fabric overview

The SAN fabric is an area of the network that contains routers and switches. A SAN is configured into a number of zones. A device that uses the SAN can communicate only with devices that are included in the same zones that it is in. A system requires several distinct types of zones: a system zone, host zones, and disk zones.

SAN fabric function is available only if a Fibre Channel option is installed. Otherwise, this information does not apply.

Note: Some operating systems cannot tolerate other operating systems in the same host zone, although you might have more than one host type in the SAN fabric. For example, you can have a SAN that contains one host that runs on an IBM® AIX® operating system and another host that runs on a Microsoft Windows operating system.

All communication between Storwize® V3700 nodes is performed through the enclosure midplane for nodes in the same control enclosure. All Storwize V3700 configuration and service commands are sent to the system through an Ethernet network.