On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 12:17 PM Hannes Reinecke <hare@xxxxxxx> wrote: > The biggest problem, however, will be to get the documentation from the > HBAs themselves. > All FC HBAs will present you with some version of cooked frames, and not > allow you to access the frames themselves. So in the end you'd have to > see to get hold of the HBA documentation itself, as you need to figure > out how to pass FICON frames into the HBA. Ah, I was hoping that it would cook the frames up to but not including the FC-4 layer. If you have data or experience to share about that not being the case I would love to hear about it. If it is just a hunch there is some value of me going down that path to confirm it is the case, but if you know for sure I'd prefer to not waste the time and maybe go the FCoE route instead. I also have some old FICON HBA cards I have gotten my hands on from virtual tape servers which I know speaks FICON, but getting some standard FC HBA to talk an acceptable level of FICON would be the absolute best if at all possible. The QLogic HBA *controller* says that it supports FC-SB-3 on the datasheet, although the card does *not* explicitly say so, but that could be a marketing thing as well I am thinking. > Sadly you'd need an FCoE bridge then to hook up the mainframe. > But as you have gotten hold of an FC analyser, getting an FCoE bridge > shouldn't be too hard, too :-) Indeed it would not be a big issue to source an FCoE -> FC SAN switch, but it would make the whole solution more elaborate that I would ideally like. However, it is an interesting model for the first version. Thanks for all the ideas, Chris
