HP BladeSystem c-Class architecture Technology brief, 4th edition

The design supports flexibility:

• Blade form factors that can scale vertically or horizontally—half-height or full-height blades and

single-, double-, or quad-wide blades

• Interconnect module form factors that can scale—single-wide or double-wide modules

• Uplinks to connect up to seven enclosures

• Signal midplane that allows flexible use of I/O signals, supporting multiple fabrics using the same

traces

Scalable blade form factors

The half-height and full-height blade form factors, which scale blades vertically in the c7000 enclosure

and horizontally in the c3000 enclosure, provide several benefits. They include reduced cost,

increased reliability, and improved ease-of-use. Placing full-height form factors, half-height form

factors, or both, in the same enclosure lets you exploit its space more efficiently. (Figure 3) For

example, you can fill the enclosure with high-performance full-height server blades, or you can use a

mixture of the two form factors.

The size of the full-height blades allows enough room to include two signal connectors on the same

printed circuit board (PCB) plane for reliable and simple connectivity to the NonStop signal midplane.

A removable, tool-less divider holds the half-height blades in the enclosure. See “Technologies in the

HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure” or “HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure” at

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/technology/whitepapers/proliant-servers.html#bll for

configurations.

The thickness of a device bay t provides several advantages over narrower or wider alternatives:

• It holds industry-standard components

• It holds enough blades to amortize the cost of the shared enclosure infrastructure (power supplies

and fans)

• It uses cost-effective, standard-height DIMMs in the server blades

• It uses vertical, rather than angled, DIMM connectors to give better signal integrity and more room

for heat sinks. The vertical DIMM connectors also allow more DIMM slots per processor and

provide better airflow across the DIMMs.