Performance and Recommended Use of AB465A Combination 2-Port 2-Gb Fibre Channel / 2-Port Gigabit Ethernet Cards

Introduction
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Introduction
This article highlights the excellent performance and high availability of HP’s new AB465A
multi-function card (Figure 1) that combines 2-ports for 2-Gbps Fibre Channel 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 achieve your business needs.
Figure 1
AB465A Combination 2-Port 2-Gbps Fibre Channel /
2-Port Gigabit Ethernet Card
Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design
The AB465A can be thought of as a combination of an HP A6826A 2-port 2Gbps Fibre
Channel card connected by a PCI-X to PCI-X bridge with a 2-port 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 AB465A 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.