Zoning overview – Brocade Fabric OS Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) User Manual
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Isolate traffic to a specific, dedicated path through the fabric. Refer to
on
page 341 for more information.
Zoning overview
Zoning is a fabric-based service that enables you to partition your storage area network (SAN) into
logical groups of devices that can access each other.
For example, you can partition your SAN into two zones, "winzone" and "unixzone", so that your
Windows servers and storage do not interact with your UNIX servers and storage. You can use zones
to logically consolidate equipment for efficiency or to facilitate time-sensitive functions; for example,
you can create a temporary zone to back up nonmember devices.
A device in a zone can communicate only with other devices connected to the fabric within the same
zone. A device not included in the zone is not available to members of that zone. When zoning is
enabled, devices that are not included in any zone configuration are inaccessible to all other devices in
the fabric.
Zones can be configured dynamically. They can vary in size, depending on the number of fabric-
connected devices, and devices can belong to more than one zone.
Consider
, which shows configured zones, Red, Green, and Blue.
• Server 1 can communicate only with the Storage 1 device.
• Server 2 can communicate only with the RAID and Storage 2 devices.
• Server 3 can communicate with the RAID and Storage 1 devices.
• The Storage 3 is not assigned to a zone; no other zoned fabric device can access it.
NOTE
When using a mixed fabric--that is, a fabric containing two or more switches running different release
levels of fabric operating systems--you should use the switch with the latest Fabric OS level to perform
zoning tasks.
To list the commands associated with zoning, use the zoneHelp command. For detailed information
on the zoning commands used in the procedures, refer to the Fabric OS Command Reference.
Zoning overview
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