HP Serviceguard Fans, Fans, Switch modules, AC input module, Power supply modules, Half-heightserver blade, Half-heightserver blade, Signal midplane Power backplane

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

FansHalf-height server bladeSwitch modules

Half-height server blade

	Fans
Power supply modules
Signal midplane Power backplane	AC input module

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.

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