Brocade SAN Glossary for Fabric OS v6.0.0
Brocade SAN Glossary 1/29/2008 Page 25 of 29
SFF Small Form Factor. An industry term for a smaller transceiver.
SFP Small Form Factor Pluggable. A transceiver used on 2Gbit/sec switches
that replaces the GBIC.
SID Source ID with three fields: Domain ID (DD), Area ID (AA), and AL_PA (PP).
SID/DID traffic prioritization is a licensed feature introduced in Fabric OS
6.0 that allows you to categorize the traffic flow into high, medium, or low
priority. Requires an Adaptive Networking license on every switch in the
path between a given configured device pair. See also QoS.
SilkWorm A former brand name for the Brocade family of switches and directors.
Single mode A fiber optic cabling specification that provides up to 10 km and > 50 km
distances between devices.
S-Link Service Facilities used between an N_Port and the Fabric, or between two N_Ports
for login, sequence/exchange management, and maintaining connections.
SLAP Switch Link Authentication Protocol. An authentication method for Fibre
Channel switches that uses digital certificates to authenticate switch ports.
SLP Service Location Protocol. Allows computers and other devices to find
services in a LAN without prior configuration.
SMDS Switched Multimegabit Data Service. A good protocol for interconnecting
LANs, however, with less error-checking capability than Frame Relay.
SMF Single Mode Fiber. See LWL.
SMI Structure of Management Information. A notation for setting or retrieving
SNMP management variables.
SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol. A TCP/IP protocol designed for
management of networks over TCP/IP, using agents and stations.
SNS Simple Name Server. A switch service that stores names, addresses, and
attributes for up to 15 minutes and provides them as required to other
devices in the fabric.
SOF Start Of Frame. A group of ordered sets that marks the beginning of a frame
and indicates the class of service the frame will use.
Software-enforced zoning
A method of zoning in which members are defined using both WWNs and
domain, port; prevents hosts from discovering unauthorized target devices.
SoIP SCSI over IP.
SONET Synchronous Optical Network. A standard for optical networks providing
building blocks and flexible payload mappings.
Special character A special 10-bit character that does not have a corresponding 8-bit value but
is still considered valid. The special character is used to indicate that a
particular transmission word is an ordered set. This is the only type of
character to have five 1s or 0s in a row.
SPOF Single Point Of Failure. Any component in a SAN whose malfunction could
bring down the entire SAN.