Fibrechannel support in 4.9 ?

[Jonathan Fosburgh]

On Wednesday 12 November 2003 09:48 am, Pete French wrote:
> A big step into the unknonw here for me as I have never used fibre channel
> before. reading through the dosc iit would seem that it is very similar
> to SCSI  in concept. We have apair of machines currently booting from
> a RAID array using HVD SCSI. Thepla is to replace this with a fibre channel
> RAID array, and thus to replace the HVD cards with some fibre channel
> interface cards, but otherwise keep the setup identical.
>

Welcome to the world of SAN. :) Someone else has already provided 
FreeBSD-specific info, here's a few other pieces of the puzzle for you.  In 
attaching a FC RAID array you will be creating a small point-to-point fibre 
channel network (a small SAN).  Internally the array is probably 
arbitrated-loop, but that should not be a concern to you.  Fibre Channel is a 
networking architecture that allows transport of other protocols, usually 
SCSI (FCP).  Curtis Preston's _Introduction to SAN and NAS_ (published by 
O'Reilly) and IBM's Redbook (redbooks.ibm.com) _Introduction to SAN_ provide 
good overviews and more in-depth material should you be interested.

-- 
Jonathan Fosburgh
AIX and Storage Administrator
UT MD Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, TX