Fibre Channel Names and Addresses

In conventional LAN technologies, each adapter is assigned a MAC address that identifies it uniquely on a global basis. This MAC address does not indicate where a system is located. On legacy LANs, every frame was placed on a shared medium and was seen by every station, so location did not matter. The fact that this was not a perfect architecture was made clear in earlier chapters, which have described the great efforts that have gone into preventing frames from being flooded across a LAN.

Fibre channel technology was built from the ground up to deliver a frame to its intended destination and to no other node. To do this, it introduces 3-byte addresses that pinpoint the location of every node port.

However, ...

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