The IBM® b-type Gen 5 Fibre Channel directors and switches provide reliable, scalable, and secure high-performance foundations for high-density server virtualization, cloud architectures, and next generation flash and SSD storage. They are designed to meet the demands of highly virtualized private cloud storage and data center environments. This IBM Redbooks® publication helps administrators learn how to implement or migrate to an IBM Gen 5 b-type SAN. It provides an overview of the key hardware and software products and explains how to install, monitor, tune, and troubleshoot your storage area network (SAN). Read this publication to learn about fabric design, managing and monitoring your network, key tools such as IBM Network Advisor and Fabric Vision, and troubleshooting.

"Do everything that is necessary and absolutely nothing that is not." This IBM® Redbooks® publication, written at a Data Center Fabric Manager v10.1.4 and Fabric Operating System v6.4 level, consolidates critical information while also covering procedures and tasks that you are likely to encounter on a daily basis when implementing an IBM b-type SAN. The products that we describe in this book have more functionality than we can possibly cover in a single book. A storage area network (SAN) is a powerful infrastructure for consolidation, distance solutions, and data sharing. The quality applications that the IBM SAN portfolio provides can help you take full advantage of the benefits of the SAN. In this book, we cover the latest additions to the IBM b-type SAN family and show how you can implement them in an open systems environment. In particular, we focus on the Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) environment. We address the key concepts that these products bring to the market and, in each case, we provide an overview of the functions that are essential to building a robust SAN environment.

This IBM® RedpaperTM publication helps network and storage administrators understand how to implement the IBM SAN42B-R Extension Switch and the IBM b-type Gen 6 Extension Blade for distance replication. It provides an overview of the IBM System Storage® SAN42B-R extension switch hardware and software features, describes the extension architecture, shows example implementations, and explains how to troubleshoot your extension products. IBM b-type extension products provide long-distance replication of your data for business continuity by using disaster recovery (BC/DR). This paper provides an overview of extension, detailed information about IBM b-type extension technologies and products, preferred topologies, example implementations with FCIP and TS7760/7700 Grid IP Extension, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

Booting servers from a storage area network (SAN) is being used increasingly in complex data center environments today, due to its significant benefits over the traditional method of booting from local disks. SAN Boot enables organizations to maximize consolidation of their IT resources, minimize their equipment costs, and realize the considerable management benefits of centralizing the boot process. In SAN Boot, you can deploy diskless servers in an environment where the boot disk is located on (often RAID-capable) storage connected to the SAN. The server (initiator) communicates with the storage device (target) through the SAN using the Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA). The system downtime is greatly minimized in case a critical component such as a processor, memory, or host bus adapter fails and needs to be replaced. The system administrator needs to swap only the hardware and reconfigure the HBA's BIOS, switch zoning, and host-port definitions on the storage server. The system image still exists on the logical drive, therefore the server is fully operational after the hardware swap and configuration change is completed. This IBM® Redbooks® publication can help you with the SAN Boot implementation. We present various SAN Boot scenarios using IBM System Storage® products that include DS5000, DS8000®, XIV®, and SVC. The operating systems that are covered include Windows 2008, Red Hat Linux, SUSE Linux, and VMware.

This IBM® Redpaper® publication describes best practices for deploying and using advanced Broadcom Fabric Operating System (FOS) features to identify, monitor, and protect Fibre Channel (FC) SANs from problematic devices and media behavior. Note that this paper primarily focuses on the FOS command options and features that are available since version 8.2 with some coverage of new features that were introduced in 9.0. This paper covers the following recent changes: SANnav Fabric Performance Impact Notification