• Loop hubs allow a physical star configuration—“loop in a box”
• Hubs provide basic management features:
– Automatic port bypass – Traffic monitoring – SNMP events
• Hubs do not contain logical ports
A Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop hub is a “loop in a box”:
The hub creates a physical star configuration that implements a logical loop.
The hub automatically bypasses ports to which no device is connected. The hub does not “participate” in the FC-AL protocol; it is essentially a passive device.
Most hubs support basic SNMP instrumentation, but other than that, they provide no real “intelligence.”