•Hard drives

•Cables

•Backplane board

•Core I/O cards

The server can contain up to eight SAS disk drives. The drives have LEDs that indicate activity and device status, and an LED used to locate each drive. Additionally, there is a set of slot availability LEDs positioned in the middle of the disk drive bays on the front of the chassis. The illuminated LEDs indicate connection and power from a SAS controller to the bank of SAS disk drive slots.

The disk drives plug directly into the SAS backplane board. There is one SAS backplane board in the server.

Two cables connect from the SAS backplane board to the SAS core I/O card. Service the SAS backplane board and SAS core I/O card from the top of the chassis.

Firmware

Firmware consists of many individually linked binary images that are bound together by a single framework at run time. Internally, the firmware employs a software database called a device tree to represent the structure of the hardware platform and to provide a means of associating software elements with hardware functionality.

The firmware incorporates the following main interfaces:

Processor Abstraction Layer (PAL)

PAL provides a seamless firmware abstraction between

 

the processor and system software and platform firmware.

System Abstraction Layer (SAL)

SAL provides a uniform firmware interface, and initializes

 

and configures the platform.

Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI)

EFI provides an interface between the operating system

 

and the platform firmware. EFI uses data tables that contain

 

platform-related information, and boot and run-time

 

service calls that are available to the operating system and

 

its loader to provide a standard environment for booting.

Advanced Configuration and Power

ACPI provides a standard environment for configuring

Interface (ACPI)

and managing server systems. ACPI moves system power

 

configuration and management from the system firmware

 

to the operating system, and abstracts the interface between

 

the platform hardware and the operating system software.

 

This enables each to evolve independently of the other.

The firmware supports HP-UX 11i version 2, June 2006 release, Linux®, Windows®, and OpenVMS 8.3 operating systems through the Itanium processor family standards and extensions, and has no operating system-specific functionality included. All operating systems are presented with the same interface to system firmware, and all features are available to the operating system.

User Interface

The Itanium processor family firmware employs a user interface defined by an HP standard called Pre-OS System Startup Environment (POSSE). The POSSE shell is based on the EFI standard shell. Several commands were added to the standard EFI Shell to support HP value-added functionality.

Event IDs for Errors and Events

The system firmware generates event IDs for errors, events, and forward progress to the iLO 2 MP through common shared memory. The iLO 2 MP interprets and stores event IDs. Reviewing

Firmware 35