Figure 10. Traces on the signal midplane can transmit many different types of signals, depending on which interconnect fabrics are used. The right-hand side of the diagram represents how the signals can be “overlaid” onto the same traces.
Each device bay signal connector has a 100-pin connector with 64 high-speed signal pins hard-wired from the device bay connector to the interconnect bays. This results in 16 lanes (64 ÷ 4) to each interconnect bay. This provides at least two lanes to each interconnect port for connectivity to LAN, storage area network (SAN), InfiniBand, or any other interconnect type. Full-height servers occupy two half-height device bays and therefore have up to 32 lanes available.
A single lane supports up to 10-Gb signals, depending on the protocol requirement. Each lane provides the flexibility of 1x, 2x, or 4x connections from the server blade mezzanine cards, which provide connectivity to the interconnect bays. The rear of the enclosure includes four interconnect bays that can accommodate four single or two redundant interconnect modules. All interconnect modules plug directly into these interconnect bays. Each HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure requires two interconnect switches or two pass-thru modules, side-by-side, for a fully redundant configuration.
Fabric connectivity and port mapping
Each enclosure requires interconnects to provide network access for data transfer. The interconnects reside in interconnect bays located on the rear of the enclosure (Figure 11). The server blades and enclosure support up to three independent interconnect fabrics, such as Ethernet, Fibre Channel, InfiniBand, and Virtual Connect modules.
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