Information Technology Reference
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power. For example, an extender can provide a single mode cable distance of 30 km.
Host bus adapters (HBAs) These are similar to SCSI host bus adapters and network
interface cards (NICs) They typically connect directly to the host computer using a stan-
dard bus, such as SBus, PCI, MCA, EISA, GIO, HIO, PMC and compact PCI.
SNA gateway These provide gateways between from Fibre channel to SNA.
Switch WAN extender These allow the interconnection to WANs using ATM or STM
services.
Fibre channel systems can be integrated into virtually any network topology. It can use point-
to-point dedicated connection, loop connection (with a shared bandwidth) or switched scaled
bandwidth. Fibre channel devices typically either connect to one of the following:
Hubs . Fibre channel hubs typically connect to a hub using copper cables. These hubs are
similar to token ring/FDDI hubs with 'ring in' and 'ring out', and each port of the hub
has an automatic port bypass circuit to automatically open and close the loop. Hubs thus
support hot insertion and removal from the loop. If an attached node is not connected or
powered on then the hub detects this and bypasses the node. Typically, a hub has 7 to 10
ports and can be stacked to the maximum loop size of 127 ports.
Switches These allow the simultaneous communication or one or more connections at
the same time.
Figure 12.1 shows an example network topology.
Point-to-
point
connection
Fibre
channel
storage
system
(hot swap)
Hub
Hub
Ring network
(up to 127 hubs)
Switch
SCSI R AID
Hub
WAN connection
(ATM/STM/FDDI)
Workstation
cluster
Figure 12.1
Fibre Channel connections
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