Can I run IP over FC on the HP-UX Tachyon HBAs (11.11) - also 11.31 HBAs?

[Alzhy]

I used to do this under Solaris (JNI HBAs) before the advent of cheap gigabit.

Can I do this with HP-UX HBAs?

I have a need for a very fast pipe - interserver.

[rick jones · Accepted solution]

At one point HP-UX had support for FC over IP, but it never caught-on and I am confident that the 11.31 HBA's don't have support for it. I'm not as confident but suspect the answer is the same for 11.11 even though there was FC-IP support in Tachyon - btw, are you sure the cards you have on 11.11 are Tachyon and not Tachlite?

[Alzhy]

Rick.. IP over FC - not the other way around.

HP Tachyon XL2 Fibre Channel Mass Storage Adapter


But I guess there's none.

Thanks.

[Torsten.]

Hi Nelson,

AFAIK there is not support for this in hp-ux at all. How about 10GB ethernet cards? Could be a solution ...

[Alzhy]

No 10GbE cards Ibelieve for PARISC Servers (majority). And as far as Itanic machines -- it is an expensive add-on.

Only our Sun Machines sport 10GbE and we aer exploiting being on the backbone (10GBE) soon for our Solaris Media Server (NBU).

[Torsten.]

Here is everything about the cards (except the price ;-)):

http://docs.hp.com/en/netcom.html#10%20Gigabit%20Ethernet

available for many systems (RISC + Integrity):

http://docs.hp.com/en/supportmatrixEthernetver2.pdf/supportmatrixEthernetver2.pdf

[rick jones]

Yes, I did flip the sense there. HP-UX used to have support for IP over FC, but it did not get used sufficiently to warrant keeping it and it went away many years ago.

10Gbit is indeed the suggested solution for a very fast pipe running IP today. The link already posted probably mentions them, but since I need the typing practice:

AB287A - PCI-X 1.0 133 MHz
AD385A - PCI-X 2.0 266 MHz
AD386A - PCIe 1.? x[4|8] I cannot recall exactly which.

I would probably pick them in the reverse order - I'd start with AD386A, if I couldn't use that, then the AD385A, and if I couldn't use that then the AB287A. PA-RISC systems don't have PCIe slots, so for those of your systems you can skip the AD386A. I'd still encourage it for any of your Integrity systems with PCIe slots. I've used the AD386A in places other than HP-UX/Integrity systems but then we start talking about:

Supported, known to work -> warm fuzzies all around
Supported, not known to not work -> an HPite may be in trouble
Supported, known to not work -> an HPite is in trouble
Unsupported, known to work -> lucky today, unlucky tomorrow?
Unsupported, not known to not work -> there but for the grace of Turing
Unsupported, known to not work -> no, it was not deliberate ;-)