HP ProLiant DL585 G5 server technology, 1st edition

stack. A busy, full-duplex gigabit Ethernet connection can consume the available computing power of

a 1-GHz Pentium 4 processor. Unfortunately, this means that even a modern, high-powered processor

will show degraded performance in processing application instructions while data is being transferred

onto or off of the network. Computers most susceptible to this problem are application, web, and file

servers that have a high number of concurrent connections.

To reduce this burden on the processor, the embedded network controller in the DL585 G5 is

designed with TCP Offload Engine (TOE) capabilities. TOE NICs (network interface cards) are

designed with on-board logic to process common and repetitive tasks of TCP network traffic. Because

the processor does not have to devote cycles to processing these tasks, it can be used more efficiently

to significantly increase application performance on servers attached to gigabit Ethernet networks.

TOE is supported on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with the Scalable Networking Pack installed.

Receive Side Scaling (RSS)

The Network Driver Interface Specifications (NDIS) define a common Application Programming

Interface for network interface cards on Microsoft operating systems. Early versions of NDIS did not

differentiate between computers with single or multiple processors. The result was that one processor

was forced to handle the entire network processing load. NDIS v6.0 includes support for multiple

processors. With NDIS v6.0 support, the DL585 G5 can dynamically balance the processing of

network packets received across multiple processors. The Scalable Networking Pack for Windows

Server 2003 is required for RSS support.

Accelerated iSCSI

iSCSI (internet SCSI) is a standard that implements the SCSI protocol for interacting with storage

devices over a TCP/IP network. While iSCSI can be implemented over any TCP/IP network, the most

common implementation is over gigabit Ethernet. iSCSI serves the same purpose as Fibre Channel in

building Storage Area Networks (SANs), but without the cost, complexity, and compatibility issues

associated with Fibre Channel SANs. A more efficient approach is to offload the management of the

protocol to the network adapter. Adapters that implement the iSCSI protocol are known as iSCSI

HBAs. The embedded NIC of the DL585 G5 is an iSCSI HBA and appears to the operating system as

a SCSI HBA.

Server management technologies

The HP ProLiant DL585 G5 server includes the HP Integrated Lights-Out 2 (iLO 2) management

technology

. iLO 2 hardware and firmware provide remote server management capabilities over

Ethernet. The iLO 2 management processor obtains its power from the auxiliary power plane of the

server, so it is always available when the server is plugged into a power source―even when the OS

not operating.

The DL585 G5 offers the ability to connect to iLO 2 through a dedicated Ethernet port. This port can

connect to a dedicated management network that is out of the data path for the server and that can

be highly secured. Alternatively, in the DL585 G5, iLO 2 can assign an additional MAC and IP

address to one of the standard embedded network interfaces and share that port with normal traffic.

This shared arrangement eliminates the need for an extra network connection for iLO 2.

For more information about iLO 2, refer to the HP technology brief titled “Integrated Lights-Out technology:

enhancing the manageability of ProLiant servers” available at

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00257345/c00257345.pdf.