Converged network enabled blades

In late June, HP began shipping two models of HP ProLiant blade servers based on the latest AMD Opteron processor. The two-socket HP ProLiant BL485c G7, which is half the height of the HP BladeSystem c7000 shelf, and the four-socket full-size HP ProLiant BL685c G7, use eight- or twelve-core Opteron 6100.

The first model is equipped with 16 slots for DDD3 memory modules and supports 256 GB RAM, and the second model has twice the DDR3 slots, so its RAM is scaled to 512 GB. Both of these blades are completed with hot-swappable two 2.5-inch SAS / SATA drives or two SSD solid-state drives and an integrated Smart Array P410 i RAID controller with a single-GB cache for which data is stored in non-volatile flash memory when the server is powered down .

The main innovation of these blades compared to their predecessors of the sixth generation is the integrated dual-port card of the converged networks HP NC551i FlexFabric 10-Gb Ethernet Converged Network Adapter, which provides support for both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and protocols for access to Fiber Channel storage systems over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI.

At present, most data centers use dedicated SAN storage network to transmit traffic to storage systems, because a regular local Gigabit Ethernet network does not have sufficient bandwidth for such large volumes of traffic, and TCP / IP does not provide traffic delivery without losing some packets. SANs are usually built on the basis of Fiber Channel technologies, although the use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet allows for sufficiently high bandwidth when using iSCSI.
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The FcoE protocol, which has recently received the status of an industry standard, allows Fiber Channel traffic over a 10 Gigabit Ethernet network and, as a result, uses the same network infrastructure to transmit TCP / IP and Fiber Channel packets, discarding a dedicated SAN network.

Replacing LANs and SANs with one converged 10 Gigabit Ethernet-based network, which is used for both data exchange traffic between client computers and servers, and between servers and storage systems, provides tangible benefits - the number of cables is significantly reduced, and the data center infrastructure is simplified and you no longer need to use switches and Fiber Channel cables that are significantly more expensive than Ethernet equipment.

From the server’s point of view, using converged networks reduces the number of network adapters of a machine by half — if the server was previously equipped with an Ethernet adapter to connect a LAN and Fiber Channel adapter to a SAN, now only one network adapter is needed and, as a result, the cost of server configuration and power consumption is reduced.

The NC551i also provides TCP / IP and iSCSI traffic handling, freeing up the computational power of server CPUs to perform these functions, and supports Virtual Connect Flex-10 technology, which allows each 10 Gigabit port to be divided into four network channels, which will be especially convenient when distributing bandwidth between different server virtual machines.

The NC551i adapter is also available as a mezzanine card that can be installed into sixth and seventh ProLiant BL blades previously released.

UPD: photo of entrails