HP Xw460c - ProLiant - Blade Workstation Overview - Page 12

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Interconnect options and infrastructure

A key component of the c7000 enclosure is the I/O infrastructure—essentially, a NonStop signal

midplane that provides the internal wiring between the server or storage blades and the interconnect

modules. The NonStop signal midplane is an entirely passive board that takes advantage of

serializer/deserializer (SerDes) technology to support multiple protocols and provide point-to-point

connectivity between device bays and interconnect bays. The term passive means there are no active

electrical components on the board. On one side of the board are the sixteen connectors for the

server/storage blades. Internal traces link them to the eight connectors on the other side of the board

for the interconnect modules (Figure 7).

The signal midplane also includes the management signals from each bay to the BladeSystem

Onboard Administrator modules. These management signals are completely isolated from the high-

speed server-to-interconnect signals. The BladeSystem Onboard Administrator is the terminating point

for all interconnect bays. An interconnect module cannot use the connection to the BladeSystem

Onboard Administrator to communicate with another interconnect module.

Figure 7. Illustration showing both the server blade connectors and the interconnect module connectors

By taking advantage of the similar four-trace, differential SerDes transmit and receive signals, the

NonStop signal midplane can support either network-semantic protocols (such as Ethernet, Fibre

Channel, and InfiniBand) or memory-semantic protocols (PCI Express), using the same signal traces.

Network-semantic interconnect protocols use network addresses in the packet headers to exchange data

between two nodes such as MAC addresses and IP addresses for Ethernet, world-wide port name for FC, or