Introduction to host attachment

This section provides overviews of key aspects of host attachment, including requirements for attaching a host, the IBM System Storage™ Multipath Subsystem Device Driver, path considerations, and some copy services restrictions. This section also provides conceptual details about fibre-channel attachment.

The DS6000™ provides extensive connectivity through Fibre Channel and FICON across a broad range of server environments, including iSeries, pSeries, zSeries, eServer p5, eServer i5, xSeries and other Intel based servers, Sun and Hewlett-Packard.

You can configure the storage unit for any of the following system adapter types and protocols:

Fibre-channel adapters, for support of fibre-channel protocol (FCP) and fibre connection (FICON^®) protocol

General requirements for attaching a host system
Before you can attach a DS6000 to a host system, you must review a list of the general requirements that pertains to all hosts. You must also review the specific host requirements described in the introduction to each specific host.
Downloading and installing a host adapter driver
This section describes the steps you can follow to download and install an AMCC/JNI, Emulex, HP, Netfinity, QLogic or Sun host adapter driver.
IBM System Storage Multipath Subsystem Device Driver
The IBM^® System Storage Multipath Subsystem Device Driver (SDD) provides redundant connections between a disk storage server and a host server in a storage unit to provide single point failure protection and performance.