Patent ID: 7724654

Claim:
In a first Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) switch connectable to a second FC-AL switch via a primary and a duplicate trunk, a method for synchronizing trunk failover, comprising: detecting a primary trunk failure and entering a failover mode; and while in the failover mode, if no MaRK (MRK) ordered set has been received from the second FC-AL switch over the duplicate trunk, sending a MRK ordered set to the second FC-AL switch over the duplicate trunk, and if an acknowledgement MRK ordered set is thereafter received from the second FC-AL switch over the duplicate trunk, reconfiguring the duplicate trunk to be a temporary primary trunk, and initiating, by the first FC-AL switch, a Loop Initialization cycle to initialize devices connected to the first and second FC-AL switches while precluding the second FC-AL switch from attempting to initiate a separate Loop Initialization cycle.