Fibre Channel Components
Infrastructure Devices
Fibre Channel Hubs
• Fibre Channel hubs are passive wiring concentrators
that can support few devices (<20)
• Only one pair of devices can communicate at a time—
bandwidth is shared
• Hubs create a topology called an arbitrated loop:
– Relatively low-cost infrastructure
– Difficult to scale to enterprise levels
– Provide only basic management functions
– Not typically used today—may exist in legacy environments
Fibre Channel hubs:
Hubs are essentially passive wiring concentrators that provide a central
point of connection for multiple devices. They create a star wired
topology but maintain the loop topology.
Hubs provide shared bandwidth — only one pair of devices at a time can
communicate with each other.