Best Practices for HP BladeSystem Deployments using HP Serviceguard Solutions for HP-UX 11i (May 2010)

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Device and Interconnect Bays
The interconnect bays for each enclosure can support a variety of Pass-Thru modules and switch
technologies, including Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand. The enclosures support redundant
I/O fabrics and can yield up to a 94% reduction in cables compared to traditional rack-mounted
server configurations.
One of the major differences between the c3000 and c7000 is in the number of available
interconnect bays; the c3000 has 4 while the c7000 has 8. The four additional interconnect bays in
the c7000 offer additional I/O flexibility and the ability to use redundant interconnects to eliminate
single points of failure (SPOFs), which is extremely important to help protect mission-critical
applications in the data center. Using redundant interconnect modules in high availability HP
BladeSystem configurations will be described in later sections of this white paper.
Figure 2 shows a side-view of a c7000 enclosure and the major component connections.
Figure 2: HP BladeSystem c-Class Enclosure Side View
The c7000 enclosure, as with the c3000, enables easy connection of embedded server device ports
from the device bays to the interconnect bays.
The enclosure signal midplane transfers I/O signals (PCIe, Gigabit Ethernet, Fiber Channel) between
the server blades (half-height or full-height) and the appropriate interconnects, and has redundant
signal paths between servers and interconnect modules. Since the connections between the device
bays (in the front of the enclosure where the blade servers reside) and the interconnect bays (in the
back of the enclosure containing the interconnect modules) are hard-wired through the signal
midplane, the Mezzanine cards – host bus adapters (HBAs) used to connect the blade servers with an
interconnect module - must be matched to the appropriate type of interconnect module. For example,
a Fiber Channel Mezzanine card must be placed in the Mezzanine connector that connects to an
interconnect bay holding a Fiber Channel switch. For port mapping purposes, it does not matter in
which bay you install a server blade; Mezzanine connectors in the blade expansion slots always
connect to the same interconnect bays.
Fans
Fans
Switch
modules
Half-height server blade
Half-height server blade
AC input moduleSignal midplane Power backplane
Power supply modules
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