6947ch02.fm Draft Document for Review April 7, 2004 6:15 pm
32 IBM eServer zSeries 990 Technical Guide
Figure 2-8 STI connectors and MBA card
Each book has three MBAs, each driving four STIs, resulting in 12 STIs per book.
All 12 STIs per book have a data rate of 2.0 GB/sec, resulting in a sustained bandwidth of 24
GB/sec per book. Consequently, the total instantaneous internal bandwidth of a four-book
system is 4 x 24 GB/sec or 96 GB/sec. Depending on the channel types installed, a maximum
of 512 channels per CPC is currently supported.
Four STIs are related to one MBA. When configuring for availability, you should balance
channels, links, and OSAs across books, MBAs, and STIs. For z990, enhancements have
been made such that, in the unlikely event of a catastrophic failure of an MBA chip, the failure
is contained to that chip, while the other two MBAs on that book continue to operate. In a
system configured for maximum availability, alternate paths will maintain access to critical I/O
devices.
In the configuration reports, books are numbered 0, 1, 2, and 3, MBAs are numbered from 0
to 2, and the STIs are identified as jacks numbered from J.00 to J.11.
Book upgrade
As a result of a concurrent book upgrade, additional MBA and STIs connectors become
available. Since now more external connections to the I/O are potentially ava ilab le , there may
be circumstances in which it might be beneficial to rebalance the total I/O configuration
across all available MBA/STIs.
Not all book upgrades will necessitate a rebalance of the I/O configuration, since the number
of STIs of the original configuration may well be able to service all existing I/O in an efficient
and balanced way.
However, if the result of the upgrade is an unbalanced I/O configuration, you should consider
rebalancing the configuration by using the additional MBA/STIs. An I/O distribution over
books, MBAs, STIs, I/O cages and I/O cards is often desirable for both performance and

Book front view

STI connectors

LEDs
SEEP
MBA
MBA
MBA
STI STI STI STI
STI STI STI STI
STI STI STI STI
FGA
VHDM 6-ROW (720 Signal Pins)
MBA card