Asking about HP InfiniBand cards and related items

[Tu9a2]

Hi all,

Our company has 3 HP DL380p G8 and 3 DL380p G7 servers. We plan to upgrade their IO connectivity to reach 10Gbps network or even higher. The main reason is that we are building Hyper Converged Infrastructure, especially SDS (VMware VSAN, or Microsoft S2D). We already have a pair of 10Gb Switches (JG219A).

We took a deep search and found some useful information:

• We see there are 2 options: 10Gb Ethernet NIC, or 40Gb InfiniBand (IB) card. We prefer InfiniBand as it has more hardware offload features that we could benefit from, such as RDMA (RoCE).
• FlexLOM card (FLR) is not an option, as the only slot has already been occupied.
• According to HP DL380p G8 and DL380 G7 QuickSpecs, the only suitable IB card is HP Infiniband FDR/Ethernet 10Gb/40Gb 2-port 544QSFP Adapter (649281-B21). However, I could not find QuickSpecs document for this card.
• As I understand, this card has Data Transmission Rate of QDR (40 Gb/s) for InfiniBand and 10 Gb/s for Ethernet (please kindly correct me if I am wrong). We also need QSFP to SFP+ adapter P/N 655874-B21 in order to use 10Gb Ethernet.
• However, I am not so familiar with InfiniBand, and not confident to tell what else we need to take. Do we need special cables in order to work with order existing 10Gb switches? Or do we need to buy special InfiniBand switches?

Hope I explained our case clearly. Long story short, we need to verify the possibility to invest on InfiniBand (6 dual-port cards) and related accessories.

Actually I tried to reach both HP Sales and PreSales teams in my country but haven't received any feedback from them for days. I have no options left but posting a question here and hope someone from the community could help me out. Thank you very much in advanced!

//Tu Nguyen