FICON-attached S/390 and zSeries hosts overview

This section describes how you can attach the DS6000™ storage unit to FICON-attached S/390^® and zSeries^® hosts.

Each storage unit fibre-channel adapter has four ports. Each port has a unique worldwide port name (WWPN). You can configure the port to operate with the FICON^® upper-layer protocol. For FICON, the fibre-channel port supports connections to a maximum of 128FICON hosts. On FICON, the fibre-channel adapter can operate with fabric or point-to-point topologies. With fibre-channel adapters that are configured for FICON, the storage unit provides the following configurations:

Either fabric or point-to-point topologies
A maximum of 506 logins per fibre-channel port
A maximum of 2000 logical paths on each fibre-channel port
Access to all 64 control-unit images (16 384 CKD devices) over each FICON port
1750 Model 511/522
Logical Subsystems 32
Logical Volumes 8192
Volume Groups 1040

Note: FICON host channels support more devices than the 4096 possible devices on a storage unit. This enables you to attach other control units or other storage units to the same host channel up to the limit that the host supports.

The storage unit supports the following operating systems for S/390 and zSeries hosts:

Transaction Processing Facility (TPF)
Virtual Storage Extended/Enterprise Storage Architecture (VSE/ESA™)
z/OS^®
z/VM^®
z/VSE^®
Linux™

For details about models, versions of operating systems, and releases that the storage unit supports for these host systems, see the Interoperability Matrix at http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/.