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

Recommended Use Based on Performance and Design
4
•
Schedule workloads for ports: All 4 ports can be cabled and connected. Schedule or
prioritize applications so that 2 ports are running full bidirectional traffic at any given
time or all 4 ports are running unidirectional traffic. The 2 ports selected can be any of
the four 1000Base-T ports on the card. This provides the best possible per port data
rates.
• Set up a pair of cards for high availability as shown in Figure 2. On the first card,
configure one technology’s pair of ports as primary or active. On the second card,
configure a pair of ports as alternate or hot standby. This is another alternative to the
scheduling technique summarized in the previous bullet: this setup would provide the
best performance and high availability. Achieving a similar level of high availability
would require using twice the number of 2-port GigE cards, or 4 times the number of
1-port GigE cards.
Figure 2 Setting Up a Pair of Cards for High Availability
The recommendations mentioned here were followed to achieve the results shown in this
article. Card throughput will be affected with configurations other than those recommended.
Besides providing exceptional performance, the AB545A with four Gigabit Ethernet ports
provides increased connectivity compared to other one-port networking cards. Please
contact an HP representative for additional help in understanding how to best deploy the
AB545A multi-function card.
Primary
GigE Ports
Alternate
Primary
GigE Ports
Alternate
}
}
} }
Port A
Port B
Port C
Port D
Port A
Port B
Port C
Port D
GigE Ports
GigE Ports