HP BL465c Technologies in HP ProLiant G5 c-Class Server Blades - Page 11
Solid state drives, Optional mezzanine cards, Networking technologies
UPC - 882780893504
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SFF drives provide higher performance than large form factor drives. The smaller SFF platters reduce seek times because the heads have a shorter distance to travel. RAID performance improves by increasing the numbers of spindles. Solid state drives HP server solid state drives (SSD) were introduced in late 2008 for use in specific BladeSystem environments. SSDs connect to the host system using the same protocols as disk drives, but they store and retrieve file data in flash memory arrays rather than on spinning media. SSDs eliminate the latency of traditional hard drives by eliminating seek times and by powering up quickly. They also achieve high random-read performance. HP SSDs provide a level of reliability equivalent to or slightly greater than current HP Midline disk drives for servers. Solid state memory (NAND) provides higher capacity, reliability, and performance for local, low-power boot drives than USB keys provide. HP server SSD interfaces are compatible with traditional disk drives connected to a SATA controller. This allows benchmarking and direct comparison of their external performance with that of disk drives to determine their suitability in various application environments.9 Optional mezzanine cards HP offers a variety of optional mezzanine cards to connect to outside networks and storage. HP ProLiant c-Class server blades use two types of mezzanine cards that connect to the various interconnect fabrics such as Fibre Channel, Ethernet, serial-attached SCSI, or InfiniBand. Type I and Type II mezzanine cards differ only in the amount of power allocated to them by the server and in the physical space they occupy on the server blade. Type I mezzanine cards have slightly less power available to them and are slightly smaller. Type I mezzanine cards are compatible with all mezzanine connectors in ProLiant c-Class server blades. Type II mezzanine cards are compatible with Mezzanine 2 or 3 connectors in full-height c-Class server blades. Type II mezzanine cards are also compatible with Mezzanine 2 connectors in half-height c-Class server blades. Both types of mezzanine cards use a 450-pin connector, enabling up to eight lanes of differential transmit and receive signals. Because the connections between the device bays and the interconnect bays are hard-wired through the signal midplane, the mezzanine cards must be matched to the appropriate type of interconnect module. For example, a Fibre Channel mezzanine card must be placed in the mezzanine connector that connects to an interconnect bay holding a Fibre Channel switch. For the most up-to-date information about the c-Class mezzanine card options, go to the HP website: http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-interconnects.html. Networking technologies Multifunction 1 Gb or 10 Gb Ethernet network adapters integrated on all c-Class server blades provide several advantages: • TCP/IP Offload engine (TOE) for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems improves CPU efficiency. • Receive-side Scaling (RSS) for Windows dynamically load balances incoming traffic across all processors in a server. • iSCSI Acceleration (available on some integrated network adapters) offloads some of the work in creating iSCSI packets from the processor onto the network controller, freeing up the processor for other work. 9 For more information about Solid state drive technology, refer to the HP technology brief titled "Solid state drive technology for ProLiant servers": http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01580706/c01580706.pdf. 11