IBM Storage Networking SAN256B-6 Fibre Channel Director (8961-F04)

8961-F04 is the IBM Storage Networking SAN256B-6, an 8U b-type Gen 6 Fibre Channel director for midsized networks. It has four horizontal blade slots, each of which can take two optional blades, for up to 192 x 32-Gbps Fibre Channel device ports plus 16 additional 128-Gbps UltraScale ICL ports. Device connectivity comes from the 48-port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel blade.

The design is non-blocking, with up to 8 Tbps aggregate chassis bandwidth, 6 Tbps of Fibre Channel port bandwidth and 2 Tbps of UltraScale ICL bandwidth, and 1.5 Tbps of bandwidth per slot. Local switching keeps same-port-set traffic off the slot bandwidth. Port-to-port latency is 900 ns for local switching and 2.7 microseconds blade to blade. Ports are universal, running as E, F, EX, M, D, SIM and FICON types.

ISL trunking is frame-based, with up to eight 32 Gbps ports per trunk for 256 Gbps, and UltraScale ICLs run 128 Gbps over a QSFP link and connect up to 12 chassis in a core-edge topology. The IBM b-type Gen 6 Extension Blade adds 16 x 32-Gbps Fibre Channel ports, 16 x 1/10-GbE ports and two 40-GbE ports for replication, and the chassis scales to four extension blades.

The chassis has redundant active and standby control processor modules and redundant WWN cards. It includes two power supplies: one is enough on 200 - 240 V AC high line and two are required on 100 - 120 V AC low line. Two fan tray assemblies are required. Airflow is either nonport-side intake or nonport-side exhaust and must be chosen when the chassis is configured, and fan and power supply assemblies must match in direction. It needs Fabric OS 8.01 or later and IBM Network Advisor 14.0 or later for the Gen 6 functions.