Patent ID: 8351448

Claim:
A system, comprising: an initiator operationally coupled to a first switch, the first switch having a plurality of ports for sending and receiving frames and includes a routing table that identifies a port identifier steering table based on an area field of a frame header of a frame received by the first switch, and a plurality of port identifier tables, where each port identifier table is associated with a unique area field and identifies a same port of the first switch for a plurality of area fields; and a second switch having a plurality of ports and operationally coupled to a target device and to the first switch, where the second switch stores an area steering table with port identification information associated with an area field of a frame header of a frame received by the second switch; wherein a same port is assigned to multiple area fields; and wherein the first switch obtains a plurality of identifier values from the second switch and the plurality of identifier values are assigned to a plurality of adapters for the initiator.