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Full Discussion: what is SAN
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers what is SAN Post 52899 by keelba on Tuesday 29th of June 2004 12:08:23 PM
Old 06-29-2004
I've always believed that there is a bit of confusion in terms that people use. I have always thought of NAS as Network Area STORAGE and SAN as Storage Area NETWORK. Anything that connects to this special network is a NAS device and it runs on a SAN. That SAN can be ethernet or fibre channel. However, I think that the common usage for most people is that SAN means fibre channel network and NAS means ethernet.

So by that definition a SAN is a network of fibre channel (a protocol) connected by either copper wires or fiber optic cables. Each device on this SAN connects through an HBA (hardware bus adapter) and 1 or more fibre channel switches. When the SAN is first installed every device on that SAN can see every other device such as a server, a tape drive, a disk drive, a tape library, disk array, etc. The SAN administrator will then set up paths to allow certain devices to "see" only certain devices and block paths to other devices. It is possible to have more than 1 computer using a certain device. This is sometimes used for clustering failover or pehaps a shared tape drive.

When you boot your computer it will see every device on the SAN that it has access to and it will look like a locally attached disk to your computer. There is no security for these devices other than that path. For example, if both a unix server and an NT server see the same drive the NT system will not know about the unix system and will claim it as its own and write its own header on that drive destroying the data for the unix system. Many people will refer to their disk array as their SAN but in reality the SAN is the network connecting the disk array. You may call the array a SAN device but not a SAN itself.

I may be slightly off on some of this and please correct me if I am wrong but this is always how I've thought of it.
 

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fp(7d)								      Devices								    fp(7d)

NAME
fp - Sun Fibre Channel port driver DESCRIPTION
The fp driver is a Sun fibre channel nexus driver that enables fibre channel topology discovery, device discovery, fibre channel adapter port management and other capabilities through well-defined fibre channel adapter driver interfaces. The fp driver requires the presence of a fabric name server in fabric and public loop topologies to discover fibre channel devices. In pri- vate loop topologies, the driver discovers devices by performing PLOGI to all valid AL_PAs, provided that devices do not participate in LIRP and LILP stages of loop initialization. CONFIGURATION
The fp driver is configured by defining properties in the fp.conf file. The fp driver supports the following properties: mpxio-disable Solaris I/O multipathing is enabled or disabled on fibre channel devices with the mpxio-disable property. Specifying mpxio-disable="no" activates I/O multipathing, while mpxio-disable="yes" disables the feature. Solaris I/O multipathing may be enabled or disabled on a per port basis. Per port settings override the global setting for the specified ports. The following example shows how to disable multipathing on port 0 whose parent is /pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4: name="fp" parent="/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4" port=0 mpxio-disable="yes"; manual_configuration_only Automatic configuration of SCSI devices in the fabric is enabled by default and thus allows all devices discovered in the SAN zone to be enumerated in the kernel's device tree automatically. The manual_configuration_only property may be configured to disable the default behavior and force the manual configuration of the devices in the SAN. Specifying manual_configuration_only=1 disables the automatic con- figuration of devices. FILES
/kernel/drv/fp 32-bit ELF kernel driver (x86) /kernel/drv/amd64/fp 64-bit ELF kernel driver (x86) /kernel/drv/sparcv9/fp 64-bit ELF kernel driver (SPARC) /kernel/drv/fp.conf fp driver configuration file. ATTRIBUTES
See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes: +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ | ATTRIBUTE TYPE | ATTRIBUTE VALUE | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |mpxio-disable |Unstable | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |manual_configuration_only |Obsolete | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ |Availability |SUNWfctl | +-----------------------------+-----------------------------+ SEE ALSO
cfgadm_fp(1M), prtconf(1M), stmsboot(1M), driver.conf(4), attributes(5), fcp(7D), fctl(7D), scsi_vhci(7D) Writing Device Drivers Fibre Channel Physical and Signaling Interface (FC-PH) ANSI X3.230: 1994 Fibre Channel Generic Services (FC-GS-2) Project 1134-D Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) ANSI X3.272-1996 Fibre Channel Protocol for SCSI (FCP) ANSI X3.269-1996 SCSI-3 Architecture Model (SAM) Fibre Channel Private Loop SCSI Direct Attach (FC-PLDA) ANSI X3.270-1996 SCSI Direct Attach (FC-PLDA) ANSI X3.270-1996 SCSI Direct Attach (FC-PLDA) NCITS TR-19:1998 Fabric Loop Attachment (FC-FLA), NCITS TR-20:1998 SunOS 5.10 2 Dec 2004 fp(7d)
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