HP Storage Essentials NAS Manager Software - Manual (Page 371)

Storage Essentials 5.1 User Guide 339
in one zone and the rest appear in another zone. Members of a zone can only communicate with
other members in the zone. If two elements are not within the same zone, they cannot communicate.
Zones are usually created for a particular task, such as controlling access between devices or
groups. You might create zones based on an application or an operating system. For example,
some network administrators prefer to put all of the Microsoft Windows computers in one zone and
all of the Sun Solaris computers in another. As mentioned previously, you can create zones
according to an application. For example, you might want to create a zone for production and
another zone for finance. This way the users in the finance department are not even aware of the
disks and ports available for production and vice versa.
Only elements in an active zone set can communicate with each other. When a zone set is not
active, it does not have any effect. If we do not want users in the Production and Finance zones to
have access to the same storage, these two zones must be in two different zone sets, which must be
both active. Since you can only have one active zone set to a fabric, the Production zone belongs to
a zone set in one fabric and the Finance zone belongs to another zone set in another fabric.
A zone can be in more than one zone set. For example, the Finance zone could be in an active and
inactive zone set. This allows for more flexibility. For example assume the Finance zone is a member
of an active zone set named Zone Set One and a member of an inactive zone set named Zone Set
Two in the same fabric. Zone Set Two contains additional zones. Assume you want to make users
aware of those elements in the additional zones. When you activate Zone Set Two, users would still
have access to the elements in Finance zone because it is also a member of Zone Two.
NOTE: Create zone aliases to easily keep track of your zones. Instead of remembering a port's
name, you can assign a meaningful name. As a best practice, a zone should contain either zone
aliases or ports, but not both.
The SAN Zoning tool is able to manage the two types of zoning:
• Switch Port Zoning (also known as hard zoning) - A hard zone is created by assigning a
domain/port to a zone. Any device attached to the port is automatically in the zone.
• WWN Zoning (also known as soft zoning) - A soft zone is created by assigning a world
wide name (WWN) of a device port to a zone.
The following figure provides an example of hard zoning. Ports 1 through 5 on the switch are
assigned to a zone for production and ports 4 through 8 are assigned to the zone for the finance
department. Users in the finance department can access storage systems B and C but not storage
system A. Likewise, users in the production department can access storage systems A and C, but not