HP UX 11i v2 Networking Software Installation Planning, Preliminary Considerations, Applications

3 Installation Planning

This document contains the following sections that give installation planning information for HP Fabric Clustering System:

•“Preliminary Considerations”

•“Features, Parameters and Supported Configurations for Database/Oracle and TCP/UDP/IP Applications”

•“Applications”

Preliminary Considerations

Before physically assembling a fabric, do the following to address all of the appropriate issues:

1.Read “What is InfiniBand?” (page 19), to get a basic understanding of InfiniBand and its components.

2.Read this chapter, Features, Parameters and Supported Configurations for Database/Oracle and TCP/UDP/IP Applications, to gain an understanding of protocol specific configuration guidelines for Database/Oracle and TCP/UDP/IP applications.

3.Decide the number of nodes that will be interconnected in the fabric.

4.Decide the type of HP server for each node (for a list of supported HP servers, see the HP Fabric Clustering System Release Notes available at http://www.docs.hp.com/en/netcom.html#Fabric%20Clustering%20System%20for%20InfiniBand

5.Determine the network bandwidth requirements for each node.

6.Determine the number of adapters needed for each node.

7.Decide the topology of the fabric.

8.Determine how many switches will be used based on the number of nodes in the fabric. HP Fabric Clustering System supports meshed switches:

9.Draw the cable connections from each node to switches (if the fabric will contain switches).

Features, Parameters and Supported Configurations for Database/Oracle and TCP/UDP/IP Applications

The following sections in this chapter define HP Fabric functionality for HP-MPI and Database/Oracle applications and TCP/UDP/IP applications.

Applications

InfiniBand is an industry standard high performance cluster and I/O interconnect architecture, and provides reliable, high speed, low latency, low CPU overhead, transport services to applications running on the HP-UX operating system.

InfiniBand was jointly developed by a large number of contributors. For details on InfiniBand, see the InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) web site, “http://www.infinibandta.org”.

When used as a clustering interconnect, InfiniBand significantly enhances the performance of parallel and technical computing applications.

InfiniBand architecture provides a shortcut that bypasses several layers in the typical protocol stack, boosting link performance and lowering latency. By avoiding interruptions and buffer copying in the protocol stack, communication task processing is optimized.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed a draft standard that enables the use of TCP/IP and UDP/IP over HP Fabric transports. The standard is referred to in this document as IPoIB.

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