Intel SEBFCM4 manual Introduction, Fibre Channel overview

1 Introduction

This Installation and User’s Guide contains instructions for installing your Intel® Blade Server Fibre Channel Expansion Card SBEFCM4, 4 Gbps in an Intel® Blade Server Chassis SBCE. This document contains information about:

•Installing and configuring the 4 Gbps Fibre Channel Expansion Card

•Updating the BIOS code and device drivers of the 4 Gbps Fibre Channel Expansion Card

The Fibre Channel Expansion Card is a 4 Gb Fibre Channel device that has two configurable adapter ports. Communication signals are routed from the blade server through the Fibre Channel high- speed connector on the Fibre Channel Expansion Card to I/O-module bay 3 and bay 4 in the Intel® Blade Server Chassis SBCE.

Note:

-The modules in I/O-module bay 3 and bay 4 must support fibre channel operation.

-When using the Expansion Card with the Optical Pass Through Module option, the Expansion Card must be used at 1 Gb or 2 Gb Fibre Channel Data Rate speed. To change the Data Rate speed setting of the Expansion Card, see Chapter 4, “Using Fast!UTIL,” on page 9 or Chapter 5, “Using the SANsurfer application,” on page 15.

This Installation and User’s Guide and the most recent versions of other documents that provide detailed information about your SBCE unit, blade server, and available options are provided in Portable Document Format (PDF) at http://www.intel.com/.

For service or assistance, see Appendix A, “Getting help and technical assistance,” on page 19.

The Intel® Blade Server Fibre Channel Expansion Card SBEFCM4 is also referred to throughout this document as the I/O expansion card or the expansion card. The Intel® Blade Server Chassis SBCE is also referred to throughout this document as the SBCE unit.

Fibre Channel overview

Fibre Channel technology is outlined in the SCSI-3 Fibre Channel Protocol (SCSI-FCP) standard. Fibre Channel is a high-speed data transport technology used for mass storage and networking.

By adding fibre channel I/O-expansion cards to the blade servers, and fibre channel compatible I/O modules to the SBCE unit, you can attach the blade server to an external storage area network (SAN) through the external 4 Gbps (gigabits per second) optical ports on the I/O modules. The expansion card provides up to 8 Gb of bandwidth for full-duplex per port.

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