Communicate between npars in HP/UX across XBAR?

[David Silvers]

Can an application, say Oracle running on a hard partition communicate with another application say BAAN running on another hard partition over the cross-bar in an integrity multi-partition system? Or do they have to communicate across the IP network..?

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

The Npars are completely isolated, so your applications will need to talk across the IP Network.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

David,

If you have a cell based server based on the latest sx2000 chipset (so thats a rx7640, rx8640 or aN sx2000 Superdome), then there's a new feature called 'Global Shared Memory' which will efectively allow communication between partitions across the Xbar backplane. However I understand the feature is OS dependent, and is only currently supported in MS W2K3/IA64. There may be plans to develop these kind of features for HP-UX/Linux/OpenVMS as well, but I'm not aware of them yet.

http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-1247/ch01s03.html#babbhaie

HTH

Duncan

[Alzhy]

David Silvers....

Ahhh.. worked on an E10K once eh? And you've used that XBAR bandwidth as a fat network pipe!? Ain't that kool?

Unfortunately it is not possible on the big irons on HP or IBM...

[David Silvers]

Nelson,

Can you elaborate? My customer is being told by IBM that using LPARS (analogous to vpars?) on a P570 and that they can communicate via shared memory/backplane.

Is there any way to do this with vpars?

What the customer really wants is separate licensing domains so he can keep his oracle costs down while adding processors - he is under the impression that having apps communicate across a private network is too slow and thinks that communicating thru the crossbar would 'be cool'.

[Alzhy]

David..

No. At least as far as any documentation on vPars/nPars from HP that I've read through.

And I did'nt know you can do that on the IBM frames... But on the 10K I've used it quite extensively some years back when Gigabit Ethernet was so darn expensive...

The only way for you to get a very fat pipe is to use 2G or 4G Fibre Channel with IP over FC support OR aggregate a couple of Gigabit ethernet links using Auto Port Aggregation software.

Hope this helps..