SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PROVIDING PROXY AND TRANSLATION DOMAINS IN A FIBRE CHANNEL ROUTER

• US 20090073992A1
• Filed: 11/17/2008
• Published: 03/19/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 07/30/2004
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Avago Technologies International Sales Pte Limited (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Original Assignee: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Broadcom, Inc.)
• Inventors: MAKISHIMA, DENNIS HIDEO, Chung, Daniel Ji Yong Park
• Granted Patent: US 8,125,992 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 370/400
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/04 Interdomain routing, e.g. hierarchical routing
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 45/60 Router architectures

Abstract

A Fibre Channel router used to join fabrics. EX_ports are used to connect to the fabrics. The EX_port joins the fabric but the router will not merge into the fabric. Ports in the Fibre Channel router can be in a fabric, but other ports can be connected to other fabrics. Fibre Channel routers can be interconnected using a backbone fabric. Global, interfabric and encapsulation headers are developed to allow routing by conventional Fibre Channel switch devices in the backbone fabric and simplify Fibre Channel router routing. Phantom domains and devices must be developed for each of the fabrics being interconnected. Front phantom domains are present at each port directly connected to a fabric. Each of these is then connected to at least one translate phantom domain. Zoning is accomplished by use of a special LSAN zoning naming convention. This allows each administrator to independently define devices are accessible.

Claims

1. A router for routing packets between a plurality of node devices connected to a plurality fabrics, the router comprising:

a plurality of ports for connection to at least two fabrics;

a proxy device unit providing a proxy of each node device in each fabric for addressing by the each other node device;

a domain presenter for presenting each port connected to a fabric having a connected node device as a domain in the fabric and presenting a translate domain for each other fabric having connected node devices as being connected to said presented port domain, with said proxy for each node device in the respective fabric being attached to said respective translate domain; and

an address translator for translating addresses in packets addressed to said proxy by a local node device connected to the fabric connected to each port as being for said other node device from said proxy of the local node device in the other fabric.

2. The router of claim 1, wherein each of the at least two fabrics has a connected node device.

3. The router of claim 1, wherein only one of the at least two fabrics has a connected node device.