HP LH6000r HP Netserver Fibre Channel HBA Guide - Page 7

1 Introduction Audience for this Manual This guide is intended for network administrators, maintenance engineers or qualified personnel who maintain and/or update servers. Since installing this Adapter involves both hardware and software installation functions, it is important that the person installing the adapter is familiar with performing such tasks as installing PCI cards, connecting cables, and installing software drivers. What is the Hewlett-Packard Fibre Channel Adapter? The Hewlett-Packard Fibre Channel Adapter is a reliable, high performance serial I/O storage interface for servers. The serial nature of Fibre Channel brings the flexibility and ease of use of LAN connectivity to storage attachment, introducing the idea of Storage Area Networks (SAN). Fibre Channel simplifies the physical configuration issues related to the I/O channel. Peripherals may be positioned at considerable distances from the server (depending on cabling media) for convenience or for data security. More reliable in data transfer than conventional LAN, Fibre Channel offers Gigabit performance and greater device connectivity than parallel SCSI. The 32/64 bit, 33 MHz, 1 Gigabit HP Fibre Channel Adapter provides the I/O channel scalability required for continuous growth in storage capacity and availability needs. The Hewlett-Packard Fibre Channel Adapter is configured to run on an Arbitrated Loop, or a Fabric environment, Class 3 operation with the SCSI FCP protocol. The SCSI FCP protocol allows the use of the standard Windows NT SCSI miniport interface, thus blending the Hewlett-Packard Fibre Channel Adapter's revolutionary I/O technology with evolutionary requirements of standards-based servers. Contents of the Fibre Channel Adapter Kits This section describes what is in the HP Fibre Channel Adapter kit. The kit contents are as follows: 1