HP Blade (680c) and HP Switch

[Dr_No]

Hello All,

I am not familiar with Blade Infrastructure.

In the traditional systems, each port on the servers was connected to a specific port on a procurve switch.

With Blades, I dont understand how the actual blade server is connected to the switch...
When you purchase a blade, it comes with ethernet 4 ports..then when you look at the HP GbE2x Interconnect I only see four ports...

Does this mean that only one server can use it?

Please explain.

Thank you!

:)

[JKytsi · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the GbE2 switch has 16 downlink ports to connect the 16 server bays in the chassis. Your blade connects to those ports (connections are hard wired in the signal midplane).
The external four ports allow You to connect blade chassis to your in house network infrastructure.

If You want all four ports of the 680 blade to be connected, You must have to switch modules.

[Dr_No]

16 downlink ports I understand.

However, when you connect the 4 external ports to my network infrastructure, wouldn't that cause bottleneck when 16 ports are trying to out to 4 ports?

Or does it work like this...16 ports on the mid plane to the servers is like connecting 16 servers (one each) to a switch and the 4 external ports are just uplinks to other switches (hence my external network infrastructure?

Just want to clear it up...thanks!
;)

[JKytsi]

Hi

"Or does it work like this...16 ports on the mid plane to the servers is like connecting 16 servers (one each) to a switch and the 4 external ports are just uplinks to other switches (hence my external network infrastructure?"

It is just like You wrote.

[Dr_No]

Excellent!

Thank you

[rick jones]

And if you are concerned about uplink bandwidth there are blade switches with 10G uplinks.

[Dr_No]

"If You want all four ports of the 680 blade to be connected, You must have to switch modules"

Have to switch modules or Have two modules?

[Igor Karasik]

>>Have to switch modules or Have two modules?

two modules

[Dr_No]

I see, so each downlink corresponds to each NIC on a given server