Discovery of fabric devices using information from devices and switches

摘要

Apparatus and methods are described for building and maintaining a detailed inventory of Storage Area Network (SAN) devices. According to one embodiment of the invention, the topology of a SAN is discovered by determining the nodes associated with the SAN. A repository host receives in-band and/or out-of-band transmissions including information regarding Input/Output (I/O) adapters associated with the non-repository hosts on the SAN. Those of the SAN nodes that correspond to storage devices are identified and associations between the hosts and the storage devices are identified based upon the information regarding I/O adapters. Finally, information regarding the characteristics of a storage device is gathered by causing an I/O adapter of a host associated with the storage device to issue one or more interconnect protocol commands to the storage device via an in-band SAN transmission.