Creating zones for your host attachment port connections enables you to manage traffic and establish redundancy that eliminates single points of hardware failure.
Depending on your environment, you can benefit from isolating traffic as much as possible in your storage area network. Networks with a large amount of volumes and heavy host traffic can benefit the most. Implementing single-initiator, single-target zoning allows you to isolate traffic for each port. Single-initiator, single-target zoning creates small zones within the fabric with only two zone members (ports). The zone consists of one target (a storage unit port), and one initiator (a host system port). The key benefit of single-initiator, single-target zoning is traffic isolation or masking.
Figure 1 displays two host systems that are attached to a DS6800 through two fabric switches. Through the switches, each of the host systems is connected to both of the DS6800 processor cards (PC-0 and PC-1) using two host adapters in each host system (HA-1 and HA-2). Traffic isolation and masking occur by creating a zone for each host system port.
