Fiber Connectivity (FICON) Part 2
RAID Recovery - Fiber Connectivity (FICON)
Cable Support
FICOM has the ability to employ FC fiber optic cables- both short wavelength and long wavelength. Long wavelength cables are popular because of their superior optical power budget and bandwidth capabilities. FICON does not support copper FC cables.
Uses
FICON is used in IBM mainframes mainly due to its compatibility with the z/Architecture. FICON and its predecessors are the only protocols capable of communicating with z/OS. There are several mainframe-specific features such as GDPS which require FICON or ESCON.
However, IBM’s System Storage DS8000 uses a mixture of FICON, FCP and ESCON ports to connect to a host. The storage in this device is divided to fixed storage volume and mainframe-specific CKD/ECKD storage volumes. Using the FCP ports, fixed storage volume can be accessed. FICON and/or ESCON ports are used to access the CKD/ECKD storage volumes.
Devices That Use FICON
Some of the disk storage facilities that use FICON to connect to the host are: EMC DMX, EMC Symmetrix, Hitachi Data Systems Lightning, Hitachi Data Systems Universal Storage Platform, and IBM System Storage IBM Enterprise Storage Server.
IBM Virtual Tape Server (VTS), IBM UltraScalable Tape Library, Sun StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) Bus-Tech MAS and MDL Virtual Tape Library are some of the tape storage facilities using FICON.
Summary: FICON is a high-speed interface between IBM mainframes and storage devices. It increases the I/O capacity with the help of a new architecture. With its faster physical link rates FICON surpasses its predecessor ESCON.
