HP DC SAN Backbone Director Switch Hardware Reference Guide (5697-2158, August 2012)

1 DC SAN Director overview
This chapter provides an overview of the DC SAN Director.
Power Pack
The DC SAN Director Power Pack model (part numbers AK857A, AK857B, and AK857C) represents
the next generation of advanced Fibre Channel (FC) enterprise-class platforms used to intelligently
interconnect storage devices, hosts, and servers in a SAN.
The DC SAN Director is the highest-performance and highest-scalability enterprise-class product
offered by HP. It satisfies the most demanding RAS, performance, and scalability requirements,
while delivering investment protection, interoperability, and fabric-based intelligence advantages.
Features
Key features of the DC SAN Director include:
• Up to 512 ports in a single chassis, providing high port density for a scalable solution to drive
high-port-count SAN configurations.
• Support for high-performance Director blades running at 1, 2, 4, 8, or 10 Gb/s, enabling
flexible system configuration.
• Supports 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gb/s autosensing FC ports. Trunking technology groups up to eight
ports to create high-performance 64 Gb/s ISL trunks between switches.
10 Gb/s ports (FC10-6) are 10 Gb/s only.
• Dual-redundant CP blades (CP8) and core switch blades (CR8) provide high availability and
enable nondisruptive software upgrades.
• Data cryptographic (encryption/decryption) and data compression capabilities through the
FS8-18 encryption blade.
• Redundant and hot-swappable CP8 and CR8 blades, power supplies, blower assemblies, and
WWN cards enable a high availability platform for mission critical SAN applications.
• ICL through CR8 blades.
• Universal ports self-configure as E_Ports, F_Ports, FL_Ports, Ex_Ports, and M_Ports.
10 Gb/s (FC10-6) are E_Ports only.◦
◦ Ex_Ports are supported on the FR4-18i router blade, FX8-24 Extension blade, and on the
FC8-xx blades with Integrated Routing license installed. 10 Gb/s CEE ports are supported
on the FCOE10-24 blade.
◦ Ships FICON and FICON Cascading ready. FICON CUP is available, but requires an
optional license.
Power Pack 7