In my previous Brocade post, I talked about Brocade zoning, and mentioned at a high level what is required to implement zoning. Prior to jumping in and creating one or more zones in your fabric, you should add aliases to describe the devices that are going to be zoned together. An alias is a descriptive name for a WWN or port number, which makes your zone configuration much easier to read (if you are the kinda person who can spout off the WWNs of all of the devices in your fabric, you can kindly ignore this post). Brocade switches come with a number of commands to manage aliases, and these commands start with the string “ali”: