Performance and Recommended Use of AB290A Combination 2-Port U320 SCSI / 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet Cards

Introduction
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Introduction
This article highlights the excellent performance and high availability of HP’s new AB290A
multi-function card (Figure 1) that combines 2-ports for U320 SCSI mass storage and 2 ports
for Gigabit Ethernet networking.
This article also provides suggestions based on the performance and technology that will
help you to best meet your business needs.
Figure 1
AB290A Combination 2-Port U320 SCSI / 2-Port
Gigabit Ethernet Card
Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design
The AB290A can be thought of as a combination of an HP A7173A 2-port U320 SCSI card
connected by a PCI-X to PCI-X bridge with a 2-port A7012A 1000Base-T card and sharing
a common PCI-X bus. All the connections sharing this single common resource perform
exceptionally well in a variety of configurations.
HP recommends the following usage model to achieve the best performance:
• Run the AB290A cards in the highest performing PCI-X-133 MHz slots. Slots 7 and 8 are
the recommended high performance PCI-X 133 MHz slots in the HP Integrity rx4640
used in our performance testing.