SCSI Flow Services Overview

An SCSI initiator and target combination is an SCSI flow. SCSI flow services provide enhanced features for SCSI flows, such as Write Acceleration and flow monitoring for statistics obtained on an SSM.

The SCSI flow services functional architecture consists of the following components:

SCSI flow manager (SFM) on the supervisor—The SFM resides on a supervisor module and handles the configuration of SCSI flows, validating them and relaying configuration information to the appropriate SSM. It also handles any dynamic changes to the status of the SCSI flow due to external events and registers changes that occur due to various operations.

SCSI flow configuration CLI on the supervisor—The SFCC resides on the CPP of the SSM. It receives flow configuration requests from the SFM, programs the DPP corresponding to the initiator and target port interfaces, and responds to the SFM with the status of the configuration request.

SCSI flow configuration client on the Control Path Processor (CPP) of an SSM.

SCSI flow feature set support on the Data Path Processor (DPP) of an SSM—The DPP on the SSM examines all the messages between the initiator and target and provides SCSI flow features, such as Fibre Channel Write Acceleration and statistics monitoring.

Note The SCSI target and initiator must be connected to different SSMs on different switches.

Note For statistics monitoring, the target device is not required to be connected to an SSM.