Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > White Papers > Dell PowerMax 2500 and 8500 Best Practices for Mission Critical Oracle Databases > Host and storage connectivity
In a typical SAN configuration, HBA ports (initiators) and storage front-end ports (targets) are connected to a switch. The switch software creates zones, pairing initiators, and targets. Each pairing creates a physical path between the host and the storage where I/Os can pass.
For example, in a server with two dual port HBAs (four initiators), if each initiator is connected to two FA ports, the result is eight paths to each device (as shown in the Figure 10). When planning host bandwidth for running DSS queries or database backups, consider the speed of the links and number of paths. For example, if the connectivity is set to 32 Gb FC, each path can deliver a maximum of ~3.2 gigabytes/sec (GB/s). If only four paths per device are configured for that host, a bandwidth of over ~12 GB/s cannot be expected.