• Discovery and management of HBAs and hosts typically requires the use of IPFC. In the near future, support for SMI-S may enable out-of- band management of hosts and HBAs.
• Some storage management functions, like SES, also require IPFC. • Not all SAN devices support IPFC. Most switches do, but some routers and bridges do not. However, most SAN management applications don’t discover routers and bridges anyway.
• The Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI) enables the management of devices such as HBAs through the fabric