Section 4.11. Summary

   

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4.11 Summary

Fibre Channel SANs constitute an important element of enterprise storage. FC may be deployed in a low-cost loop configuration or, as is increasingly popular, in a switched-fabric topology.

Windows Server 2003 supports Fibre Channel devices by using a vendor-provided Storport driver. The vendor may choose to provide a SCSI port minidriver instead, but in that case the advantages of the Storport driver (better performance and error handling, to name a couple) are not available to the user . Windows 2000 and prior versions support Fibre Channel devices by using a vendor-provided SCSIPort minidriver.

Even though Windows NT allows LUN masking and zoning to be implemented, no native support for LUN masking yet exists in Windows NT. LUN masking in Windows NT may be implemented in vendor-written drivers.

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