Patent ID: 7779137

Claim:
A method for building a failover-enabled communications link, comprising: receiving, by a first Fibre Channel (FC) storage device, input of a plurality of upper-level addresses, based on an upper-level protocol, assigned to a FC port of the first FC storage device, the first FC storage device supporting the FC protocol at a base layer, wherein the plurality of upper-level addresses includes a primary address and a backup address, wherein the backup address is associated with a second FC storage device; registering, by the first FC storage device, a symbolic name for the FC port of the first FC storage device with a name server, wherein a symbolic name field is encoded with the plurality of upper-level addresses including the primary address, and the backup address associated with the second FC storage device, wherein the symbolic name is encoded with the primary address and the backup address based on a predefined encoding scheme that includes using selected bytes in the symbolic name field defined in the FC protocol to store the primary address and the backup address; detecting, by the first FC storage device, a link failure between the second FC storage device and a third FC storage device; determining, by the first FC storage device, the backup address based on the position of the backup address within the symbolic name field; and linking, by the first FC storage device, the FC port of the first FC storage device over a fabric network to the third FC storage device using the backup address determined from the symbolic name field.