The HBA API has been overwhelmingly adopted by Storage Area Network vendors to help manage, monitor, and deploy storage area networks. It defines a scope within which application software can be written without attention to vendor-specific infrastructure behaviour.
Included within the scope of the HBA API are vendor-independent interfaces and services such as:
Viewing and modifying configuration of Fibre Channel HBAs and ports Monitoring HBA, port, and storage access traffic statistics and events
Viewing and modifying mapping of storage resources to operating system (persistent binding)