Performance and Recommended Use of AB545A 4-Port Gigabit Ethernet Cards

Introduction
3
Introduction
This article highlights the excellent performance and high availability of HP’s new AB545A
card (Figure 1) that provides four 1000Base-T 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
AB545A 4-Port Gigabit Ethernet Card
Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design
The AB545A can be thought of as a combination of two 2-port 1000Base-T cards
connected by a PCI-X to PCI-X bridge 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 AB545A 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.