The Servers and Switches

Five of the seven blade servers announced now have a 10GigE LAN on Motherboard (LOM) design that enables IP, FC, and iSCSI traffic all running on the two embedded 10GigE ports on each blade motherboard. The LOM is sourced from Emulex through its announced acquisition of ServerEngines. The three rack servers can all be outfitted with the same technology with an HP add-in adapter built by Emulex that has an SFP+ interface that the user can connect either an SFP+ optical module or an SFP+ Twinax copper cable. With HPs 56% share of blades and 38% share of x86 servers, the number of 10GigE ports shipping in servers later this year and next will grow exponentially.

HPs converged fabric is enabled by the HP Virtual Connect FlexFabric 10-Gb/24-port module, a blade module that installs in HPs BladeSystem and interfaces with the blade backplane via 10GBase-KR and in turn to the outside world via eight SFP+ uplink modules. The blade servers do not use SFP+ modules as the interface to the blade system backplane is via 10GBase-KR. Rather the opportunity for SFP+ modules in blades is in the eight uplinks in the blade module. The blade module was co-developed by HP with QLogic.

August 2, 2011

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