This INTEGER (up (1) or down (2), default up) is the user-settable administrative state of an 8G Fibre Channel (FC8G) storage client port, representing permission to use the resource independent of whether it is actually working. An administrator sets this to down to deliberately take the facility out of service for maintenance, without depending on or waiting for any hardware fault condition. For example, setting FC8G's administrative status to down before swapping a pluggable module prevents the system from raising spurious loss-of-signal alarms during the physical replacement.