Brocade FICON Administrator’s Guide (Supporting Fabric OS v7.3.0) - Manual (Page 18)

switches and backbones is also supported. An example of this would be a Brocade DCX 8510-8
Backbone connected to a Brocade 6510.
A cascaded configuration (refer to the following figure) requires two-byte addressing. Two byte-
addressing requires a list of authorized switches. This authorization feature, called fabric binding, is
available through the Secure Access Control List feature. The fabric binding policy allows a predefined
list of switches (domains) to exist in the fabric and prevents other switches from joining the fabric. This
type of configuration is described in
User security considerations on page 33.
FIGURE 3 Cascaded FICON
There are hardware and software requirements specific to two-byte addressing:
• Both the FICON switches must be Brocade switches.
• The mainframes must be zSeries machines or System z processors: z196, z114, z800, 890, 900,
990, z9 BC, z9 EC, z10 BC, EC, and zEC12. Cascaded FICON requires 64-bit architecture to
support the two-byte addressing scheme. Cascaded FICON is not supported on 9672 G5/G6
mainframes.
• z/OS version 1.4 or later, or z/OS version 1.3 with required Program Temporary Fixes (PTFs) and
Microcode Loads (MCLs) to support two-byte link addressing (DRV3g and MCL (J11206) or later)
is required.
• Switch configuration requirements:
‐ Make sure that E_D_TOV is the same on all switches in the fabric (typically, this is not
changed from the default)
‐ Make sure that R_A_TOV is the same on all switches in the fabric (typically, this is not
changed from the default)
‐ Configure insistent Domain ID (IDID)
‐ Configure fabric binding (strict SCC policy)
Qualified FICON cascaded configurations
Not all fibre channel fabrics are qualified for FICON. Cascaded FICON configurations are limited to
well-controlled paths. Only the channel paths illustrated in this section are supported for FICON. The
Qualified FICON cascaded configurations
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