Can an RP8420 server have A6795 and AB379A cards installed on the same cell

[Debbie Beresford]

I am very new to hardware and would appreciate any help you can give me.  I have been looking for a manual that will show me what the slots are for on an RP8420 but I am not having any luck.

We currently have an RP8420 server with 2 A6795 fibre cards for redundancy.  I have been told we are changing our SAN but the new SAN does not support these fibre cards.  They would like me to install 2 - AB379A cards which are supported by our new SAN.  I have 2 slots available so I am assuming I can put the new cards in these. 

Until we do the cutover, they would like to have the A6795 cards connected to the old SAN as well as the AB379A cards connected to the new SAN.  this will allow us to keep running with the old SAN and configure the disks for use on the new SAN at the same time.  Is this a reasonable scenario? 

[Arnaud Delaloy · Accepted solution]

hello,

  that's exactly how we upgraded from one SAN to another on our rp8420s : at one time it had even three generations of cards active  : some old Tachyon XL2 A6795 , some combo FC 2Gb/GigEth A9784 and some dual 4Gb/s AB379A .

 one of the strong points of RP8420s is indeed its very very large number of I/O PCI slots, and the abilty to add these card online (with the rad  / olrad command), it was surprisingly easy to do.

hope that helps,

Arnaud.

[Debbie Beresford]

Thank you very much Arnaud.  That does indeed help.

[Bill Hassell]

>> a manual that will show me what the slots are for on an RP8420

The I/O card cages are all PCI so all slots are essentially the same. The PCI card cage is split in half so you'll need to determine which side to put the cards based on the cell board that will use them. Whenever I need a list of compatible hardware, I use the secret word: quickspecs as in a Google search: hp rp8420 quickspecs

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04142104.pdf

(there is an earlier version out there that doesn't show the AB379A but the above is version 28 - 2009 and is OK)

The manual is here but (215 pages) unnecessary since the new cards are supported in this server:

http://h20628.www2.hp.com/km-ext/kmcsdirect/emr_na-c01879277-2.pdf

And although you can add the cards with the system running, you need at least a foot of empty space above the server to lift the lid and insert the card. They will be a mechanically tight fit so I would recommend a trained CE to add the cards. If you do this with power on, you'll need to become familiar with the OLAR tools. And if the server is heavily cabled in back with fibre, LAN, SCSI, etc, I would simply plan for a maintenance window in case some cables are damaged or pulled loose.

The server may not have the driver for the AB379A cards. If it doesn't, download it here:

https://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=FibrChanl-01

The install will require a reboot. If you do the install prior to shutting down to install the card, then you only need one reboot.