The preferred practice for the 2145-SV1 is similar. The significant change is on the slot  placement, and that there is no dual port HBA configuration option, as shown in Figure 1-13. Due to the new port availability on the 2145-DH8 and 2145-SV1, and the increased  bandwidth with the 16 Gb ports, it is possible to segregate the port assignment between hosts  and storage, thus isolating their traffic.  Host and storage ports have different traffic behavior, so keeping host and storage ports  together produces maximum port performance and utilization by benefiting from its full duplex  bandwidth. For this reason, sharing host and storage traffic in the same ports is generally the  preferred practice. However, traffic segregation can also provide some benefits in terms of  troubleshooting and host zoning management. Consider, for instance, SAN congestion  conditions due to a slow draining device.  In this case, segregating the ports simplifies the identification of the device causing the  problem. At the same time, it limits the effects of the congestion to the hosts or backend ports  only. Furthermore, dedicating ports for host traffic reduces the possible combinations of host  zoning and simplifies SAN management. It is advised to implement the port traffic  segregation with configurations with a suitable number of ports (that is, 12 ports or more)  only. Important:  Use port masking to assign specific uses to the SAN Volume Controller ports.  For more information, see Chapter 6, “Hosts” on page 279. 14  IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller, IBM Storwize V7000, and IBM FlashSystem 7200 Best Practices Figure 1-13 2145-SV1 port masking