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Brocade Fabric OS Administrators Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) User Manual

Page 536

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• Backbone fabric

A backbone fabric is an intermediate network that connects one or more edge fabrics. In a SAN, the
backbone fabric consists of at least one FC router and possibly a number of Fabric OS-based Fibre
Channel switches (refer to

Figure 84

).

• Inter-fabric link (IFL)

The link between an E_Port and EX_Port, or VE_Port and VEX_Port, is called an inter-fabric link
(IFL). You can configure multiple IFLs from an FC router to an edge fabric.

Figure 82

shows a metaSAN consisting of three edge fabrics connected through a Brocade DCX

with inter-fabric links.

FIGURE 82 A metaSAN with inter-fabric links

• Logical SANs (LSANs)

An LSAN is defined by zones in two or more edge or backbone fabrics that contain the same
devices. You can create LSANs that span fabrics. These LSANs enable Fibre Channel zones to
cross physical SAN boundaries without merging the fabrics while maintaining the access controls of
zones.

An LSAN device can be a physical device , meaning that it physically exists in the fabric, or it can
be a proxy device .

Figure 83

shows a metaSAN with a backbone consisting of one FC router connecting hosts in edge

fabrics 1 and 3 with storage in edge fabric 2 and the backbone fabric through the use of LSANs.
Three LSAN zones allow device sharing between the backbone fabric and edge fabric 1, between
edge fabric 1 and edge fabric 2, and between edge fabric 2 and edge fabric 3.

Using FC-FC Routing to Connect Fabrics

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Fabric OS Administrators Guide

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