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22-2
Cisco MDS 9000 Family Fabric Manager Configuration Guide
OL-6965-03, Cisco MDS SAN-OS Release 2.x
Chapter 22 FICON Configuration
About FICON
About FICON
The Cisco MDS 9000 Family supports the Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), FICON, iSCSI, and FCIP
capabilities within a single, high availability platform. This solution simplifies purchasing, reduces
deployment and management costs, and reduces the complex evolution to shared mainframe and open
systems storage networks (see Figure 22-1).
Figure 22-1 Shared System Storage Network
FCP and FICON are different FC4 protocols and their traffic are independent of each other. If required,
devices using these protocols can be isolated using VSANs.
MDS-Specific FICON Advantages
This section explains the additional FICON advantages in Cisco MDS switches.
Fabric-Optimization with VSANs
Generally, separate physical fabrics have a high level of switch management and have a higher
implementation cost. Further, the ports in each island may be over-provisioned depending on the fabric
configuration.
By using the Cisco MDS-specific VSAN technology, you can introduce greater efficiency between these
physical fabrics by lowering the cost of over-provisioning and reducing the number of switches to be
managed.
Open
storage
Open
systems
Control
unit
Mainframe
systems
Open systems VSANs
FICON VSAN
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