This IBM® Redpaper® publication describes best practices for deploying and using advanced Broadcom Fabric Operating System (FOS) features to identify, monitor, and protect Fibre Channel (FC) SANs from problematic devices and media behavior.

Note that this paper primarily focuses on the FOS command options and features that are available since version 8.2 with some coverage of new features that were introduced in 9.0.

This paper covers the following recent changes:

• SANnav
• Fabric Performance Impact Notification

Fabric best practices using IBM SAN-b switches

Introduction

Designing resiliency into the fabric

Maintaining an optimal FC SAN environment

Maintaining an optimal FCIP SAN environment

Monitoring a FC SAN environment

FICON

Access gateway

Frame Viewer

Forward Error Correction

Summary of best practices