Information About FICON

The Cisco MDS 9000 Family supports the Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), FICON, iSCSI, and FCIP capabilities within a single, high-availability platform.

The FICON feature is not supported on:

• Cisco MDS 9120 switches
• Cisco MDS 9124 switches
• Cisco MDS 9140 switches
• The 32-port Fibre Channel switching module
• Cisco Fabric Switch for HP c-Class BladeSystem
• Cisco Fabric Switch for IBM BladeSystem

FCP and FICON are different FC4 protocols and their traffic is independent of each other. Devices using these protocols should be isolated using VSANs.

The fabric binding feature helps prevent unauthorized switches from joining the fabric or disrupting current fabric operations (refer to the Cisco MDS 9000 Family NX-OS Security Configuration Guide). The Registered Link Incident Report (RLIR) application provides a method for a switch port to send an LIR to a registered Nx port.

This section includes the following topics:

• FICON Requirements
• Cisco MDS-Specific FICON Advantages
• FICON Cascading
• FICON VSAN Prerequisites
• FICON Port Numbering
• Default FICON Port Numbering Scheme
• Port Addresses
• Implemented and Unimplemented Port Addresses
• About the Reserved FICON Port Numbering Scheme
• Installed and Uninstalled Ports
• About Port Numbers for FCIP and PortChannel
• FC ID Allocation
• About Enabling FICON on a VSAN
• FICON Information Refresh
• About FICON Device Allegiance
• Automatically Saving the Running Configuration
• Port Prohibiting
• About RLIR
• Port Swapping
• FICON Tape Acceleration
• CUP In-Band Management

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