Owners Manual

Fabric B
Fabric B is a 1 to 40 Gb/sec redundant fabric, supporting I/O module slots B1 and B2. Fabric B currently supports 1 Gb or 10 Gb Ethernet,
DDR/QDR Infiniband, and 4 Gbps or 8 Gbps fibre channel modules. Additional fabric types may be supported in the future.
NOTE: Fabric B supports up to 16 Gbps fibre channel, Infiniband FDR (14 Gbps standard), and KR (10 Gbps standard).
To communicate with an I/O module in the Fabric B slots, a blade must have a matching mezzanine card installed in a Fabric B mezzanine
card location.
Modules designed for Fabric A may also be installed in the Fabric B slots.
Fabric C
Fabric C is a 1 to 40 Gb/sec redundant fabric, supporting I/O module slots C1 and C2. Fabric C currently supports 1 Gb or 10 Gb Ethernet,
DDR/QDR Infiniband, and 4 Gbps or 8 Gbps fibre channel modules. Additional fabric types may be supported in the future.
NOTE:
Fabric C supports up to 16 Gbps fibre channel, Infiniband FDR (14 Gbps standard), and KR (10 Gbps standard).
To communicate with an I/O module in the Fabric C slots, a blade must have a matching mezzanine card installed in a Fabric C mezzanine
card location.
Modules designed for Fabric A may also be installed in the Fabric C slots.
Port Auto-Disablement in Quad-Port Network
Daughter Card (Dell PowerEdge M710HD Only)
Systems installed with quad-port Network Daughter Card support a Port Auto-Disablement feature. This feature disables the third (NIC3)
and fourth (NIC4) ports of a quad-port network daughter card during system boot, if the corresponding I/O module installed in the chassis
Fabric A slots does not support quad-port mapping. This behavior is limited to Fabric A slots only and is automatically enabled or disabled
depending on the type of I/O module installed.
NOTE:
A quad-port network daughter card must be used with a 48-port switch module (32 internal ports) for all the
ports to be active.
NOTE: LOM firmware updates are applied only to the enabled ports on a quad-port network daughter card.
The following table provides an overview of the configurations that enable or disable the NIC3 and NIC4 ports of a quad-port network
daughter card.
Table 2. Port Auto-Disablement Decision Table
IOM Slot A1 IOM Slot A2 NIC3 and NIC4 (Enabled/
Disabled)
Port Auto-Disablement
Empty Empty Enabled Inactive
Empty Dual Port Disabled Active
Empty Quad or Greater Port Enabled Inactive
Dual Port Empty Disabled Active
Dual Port Dual Port Disabled Active
Dual Port Quad or Greater Port Enabled Inactive
Quad or Greater Port Empty Enabled Inactive
Quad or Greater Port Dual Port Enabled Inactive
Quad or Greater Port Quad or Greater Port Enabled Inactive
Configuring The I/O Modules 31