Cisco Technology, Inc.

Badrinarayanan Ramaswamy

Subrata Banerjee

Thomas James Edsall

Harsha Bharadwaj

Madhava Rao Cheethirala

Ankur Jain

Joy J Chatterjee

Vinay Gaonkar

Rituparna Agrawal

Sudheer Yelanduru Raghavendra

In an example embodiment, a new qualifier is added to members in a Fiber Channel zone to specify whether each member is a target or initiator and in another embodiment a time-range attribute is added to a zone in the zoneset. When the zoneset is applied the number of ACL entries that must be programmed is reduced from k&#xd7;(k&#x2212;1) entries to 2(k&#x2212;1) entries for a zone with k members where k&#x2212;1 members are of one type (e.g. initiators) and one of the members is of a different type (e.g., a tape device). The time-range attribute is enforced by zone server software and enhances security by, for example, limiting access to sensitive data to specified times. In another embodiment, an incremental zoneset activation protocol is implemented where a hash of a zoneset is created by a switch updating the zoneset and the hash and ID of the switch updating the zoneset are sent to all other switches in the fabric when the zoneset is propagated. The hash and switch ID are stored in persistent storage at all switches in the fabric. When a target zoneset is updated by a source switch only the incremental change is propagated to other switches in the fabric along with the hash and switch ID of the target zoneset. Each switch checks a received hash and switch ID against its stored hash and switch ID to assure that the stored local zoneset is the same as the target zoneset before applying the incremental change.

Optimizing fibre channel zoneset configuration and activation

According to the present invention, methods and apparatus are provided to allow for distribution of fiber channel messages. Messages associated with a variety of applications can be distributed within a single logical fabric to physical connected but logically disconnected fabrics. Interconnecting switches forward messages to neighboring fabrics and aggregate responses before replying to a first fabric.

Message distribution across fibre channel fabrics

Disclosed are apparatus and methods for facilitating communication between two devices from two different VSANs by propagating each device's presence from a first VSAN to the other device's different VSAN using a network address translation (NAT) mechanism. For instance, a first device, such as a host H, from VSAN_A is allowed to access data from a second device, such as disk D, of VSAN_B by propagating Ds presence into VSAN_A and Hs presence into VSAN_B. This awareness is accomplished by propagating an identifier for each device into the edge VSAN of the other device, as well as into any transit VSAN. So as to not duplicate identifiers in any one of the VSANs, a device's presence is propagated into a particular VSAN by assigning an unused domain for use by such device in the particular VSAN.

Inter-VSAN routing with NAT

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Saratoga, CA, United States of America

Badrinarayanan Ramaswamy