HP ProLiant BL660c HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture - Page 10

Figure 6. The scalable device bays and interconnect bays enable redundant star topologies that differ depending on the customer configuration. blades Interconnect Module A Interconnect Module B blades Interconnect Module A Interconnect Module B blades blades NonStop signal midplane provides flexibility The BladeSystem c-Class uses a high-speed, NonStop signal midplane that provides the flexibility to intermingle blades and interconnect fabrics in many ways to solve a multitude of application needs. The NonStop signal midplane is unique because it can use the same physical traces to transmit GbE, Fibre Channel, 10 GbE, InfiniBand, SAS, or PCI Express signals. As a result, customers can fill the interconnect bays with a variety of interconnect modules, depending on their needs. Physical layer similarities among I/O fabrics The NonStop signal midplane can transmit signals from different I/O fabrics because of similarities in the physical layer of those fabrics. Serialized I/O protocols such as GbE, Fibre Channel, 10GbE, SAS, PCI Express, and InfiniBand are based on a physical layer that uses multiples of four traces with the SerDes (serializer/deserializer) interface. In addition, the backplane Ethernet standards2 of 1000-Base-KX, 10G-Base-KX4, and 10G-Base-KR, and the 8 Gb Fibre Channel standard3 use a similar four-trace SerDes interface (see Table 1). 2 IEEE 802.3ap Backplane Ethernet Standard, in development, see www.ieee802.org/3/ap/index.html for more information. 3 International Committee for Information Technology Standards, see www.t11.org/index.htm and www.fibrechannel.org/ for more details. 10