5.6.x HP X9000 Series Network Storage System Installation Guide (TA768-96056, December 2011)

Network switches in the X9300 Storage System base rack (AW546B)
The X9300 base rack includes two HP ProCurve 2910al-48G network switches. These switches
are equipped with the 10GbE interconnect modules and provide:
• 96x 1GbE network ports (48 ports per switch)
• 4x 10GbE CX4 ports (2 ports per switch) for switch interconnection
The cluster network switches are “stackable,” and when connected together through the 10GbE
CX4 interconnect ports, the pair operate as a single switch. This provides switch redundancy and
when combined with path redundancy, it allows the cluster network to tolerate the following failure
conditions:
• Cable failure (up to 3 of 4 cluster network cables per server)
• NIC port failure (up to 3 of 4 cluster network NIC ports per server)
• Switch port failure (up to 3 of 4 ports per attached server)
• Whole switch failure
NOTE: The switches must be interconnected via the 10GbE CX4 interconnect module and cable
at all times. The 10GbE interconnect module is on the back side of each switch (facing the front
of the rack). If link aggregation is not used on the interconnects, HP requires that you enable
spanning-tree on the network switches to eliminate network loops.
The following diagram shows the network switch interconnection.
Assigning switch ports on the cluster network switch
The network ports on the cluster-networked switch should be allocated as shown in the following
figure. The grouping of ports is for logical organization only and does not indicate any VLAN
configuration. As shipped from the factory, the switch contains the default VLAN with all ports
included. If network isolation is required between multiple X9320/X9300 clusters within the same
rack and attached to the same cluster network switch, the ports associated with each cluster must
be placed into independent VLANs on the switch. If the second rack switch is being used as a
standby or spare, remember to create the VLAN configuration on that switch as well.
64 Network best practices for X9300 and X9320 systems