Host systems that DS6000 series supports

The DS6000 series provides a variety of host attachments so that you can consolidate storage capacity and workloads for open-systems hosts and zSeries hosts. The storage unit can be configured for fibre-channel adapters, for support of Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) and Fibre Connection (FICON) Protocol.

For fibre-channel attachments, you can establish zones. The zones must contain a single port that is attached to a system adapter with the desired number of ports that are attached to the storage unit. By establishing zones, you reduce the possibility of interactions between system adapters in switched configurations. You can establish the zones by using either of two zoning methods:

Port number
Worldwide port name (WWPN)

You can configure switch ports and hub ports that are attached to the storage unit in more than one zone. This enables multiple system adapters to share access to the storage unit fibre-channel ports. Shared access to an storage unit fibre-channel port might come from host platforms that support a combination of bus adapter types and the operating systems. For information about host systems, operating system levels, host bus adapters, cables, and fabric support that IBM supports, see the DS6000 series Interoperability Matrix at:

http://www.ibm.com/servers/storage/disk/ds6000/.

Retrieve a list of supported host bus adapters (HBAs), firmware, and device driver information for your host system and host adapter at http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/storage/support/config/hba/index.wss.

Fibre-channel host attachments
Fibre-channel technology supports increased performance, scalability, availability, and distance for attaching storage subsystems to network servers. Fibre-channel technology supports applications that require large amounts of disk storage that is shared by two or more servers. You can use fibre-channel to connect large amounts of disk storage to a server or cluster of servers.
Open-systems hosts with fibre-channel adapters
You can attach a DS6000 series to an open-systems host with fibre-channel adapters.
FICON-attached zSeries hosts
The DS6000 series supports FICON-attached and zSeries^® hosts.

Parent topic: Host system attachment