NonStop NS-Series Planning Guide (H06.03+)

Control, Configuration, and Maintenance Tools
HP Integrity NonStop NS-Series Planning Guide—529567-004
5-7
I/O Functional Element
I/O Functional Element
The IOAM enclosure contains the functionality of two fabric functional elements. In
addition, each IOAM enclosure is divided into two IOAMs, each of which contains five
ServerNet adapters and one ServerNet switch board. (See I/O Adapter Module (IOAM)
Enclosure and I/O Adapters on page 2-17).
Each IOAM connects directly to a p-switch and contains a single ME that resides within
the ServerNet switch board, along with the ServerNet fabric interconnect.
The I/O functional elements include Fibre Channel ServerNet adapters (FCSAs), Fibre
Channel storage devices (disk or tape) or 4-port Gigabit EtherNet ServerNet adapters
(G4SAa). The storage or transport protocols used in the ServerNet adapters are
irrelevant to the maintenance architecture. Maintenance aspects of the disk drive
enclosures are handled indirectly via the FCSAs.
The fabric functional element is a redundant ServerNet IPC interconnect medium that
interconnects both the processor and the I/O functional elements. This interconnection
medium provides diagnostic capabilities via the p-switches and ServerNet cables.
The diagram in Maintenance Architecture Overview on page 5-5 depicts each of the
functional elements containing at least one ME. Any of the functional elements shown
can and usually are composed of multiple functional elements of the same type. For
example, the fabric element includes two p-switch interconnect modules, each of which
has an ME and connects to either the X or the Y ServerNet.
IOAM ME Firmware
When the ME firmware is executing within a ServerNet switch installed in an IOAM
enclosure, it initializes, controls, and monitors all of its local functional elements for its
parent module, module 2 or 3. No direct hardware connection exists between the two
ServerNet switched installed in an IOAM enclosure, so the ME firmware on a given
IOAM has no hardware responsibilities in terms of its peer IOAM.
Unlike the ME firmware executing in a p-switch, the ME firmware in an IOAM does not
execute in a primary versus secondary status.
Processor Functional Element
In the NonStop advanced architecture (NSAA), a logical processor is a distribution of
physical processor elements (PEs), each of which resides within a separate physical
module. (See Processor Complex on page 1-3.) The logical processor maintenance
entity is relegated to the halted state services or standard millicode software running
on a given set of PEs that makes up one logical processor.
The ME firmware in each p-switch only interacts with a logical processor via ServerNet
using the SMIP ServerNet-based communication protocol to send command requests
to a logical processor and respond to command requests from a logical processor. The
p-switch ME firmware does not have any data regarding the number of PEs per
processor slice, slices per processor complex, or the LSUs.