– 126 NL_Ports – One address reserved for fabric attachment (FL_Port)
Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) topology: Physical devices are connected to the hub in a star topology Data moves in a loop Limits throughput and limits the scalability of the SAN: Adding more devices increases the physical length of the loop
FC-AL protocol supports limited management features Fibre Channel hubs are less expensive than switches (just like Ethernet) Hub topologies are most appropriate for: The “edges” of a larger distributed network
Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC_AL) was introduced as a
replacement for parallel SCSI. FC_AL supports more devices (126) than wide SCSI (16) FC_AL supports full duplex operation, SCSI is half duplex FC_AL supports greater shared bandwidth between devices - 2 x 400MB/s (4 Gb/s Full Duplex)