Proliant Gen8 Servers - undocumented feature?

[PDP-Fan]

On the DL360p and DL380p Gen8 are two bare metal contacts on the left side of the front bezel. Two wires are routed from there to the disk backplane (DL360) and plugged in there. The DL360 wires have the PN 697195-001...

Does someone know what this is good for? Is it some sort of intrusion detection? Or are there options that connect to this? Factory diagnostics...?

 I searched for the part number. looked onto the user and maintenance manual but no information there.

[Arnaud Delaloy]

hello,

If I recall corerctly, it is (was?) used with some "HP intelligent rack" series, where on the left hand side of each U there are two prongs, connected to a small network box in the bottom.

when a server (or disk array)  makes contact there, it allows the box to know what is racked where (with some resistive voodoo formula and ILO4 black magic ?)

sorry, I can t find neither a quickspec nor a picture...

[parnassus · Accepted solution]

Yep, read more here:

"HPE Location Discovery Services

HPE Location Discovery Services is the first solution that merges the physical rack with IT equipment to provide automated location awareness of installed servers for advanced asset management and workload placement.

HPE Advanced and Enterprise Series Racks equipped with the Location Discovery option provide detailed location information to ProLiant servers to track new installations and equipment moves. Upon installation the server's iLO queries and records the rack identifier as well as the exact U location of the server in the rack. Once the server knows exactly where it is located this information can be forwarded to other systems such as HPE OneView and HPE Insight Control to automatically update new rack configuration.

This saves time in configuring hardware and software to manage the data center while eliminating constant manual updates and the associated human errors that can slow resolution to issues and even cause down time and loss of business."

So @Arnaud Delaloy is right about HPE Enterprise Series Rack.

[PDP-Fan]

Thanks for the answers... I have never heard of that :-)

It seems that on the Gen9 servers, this feature has been dropped. Or do they have a non-contact version? I can not see any contacts anymore.