An abstraction module that facilitates security configuration amongst a
number of initiators in a manner that there are no conflicts in the
security information across all initiators. The abstraction module
exposes a common interface that may be used to configure any of the
initiators, receives through this common interface an indication that a
selected one of the initiators is to be configured to communicate with a
selected target device, and retrieves security information from a common
database, the database including information that is relevant to
configuring security for any of the plurality of initiators. The
abstraction module identifies a security configuration for the selected
initiator using the retrieved security information and, if the settings
would not cause a conflict with any of the other of the initiators, uses
the identified security configuration to configure the selected
initiator.