Performance and Recommended Use of AD222A, AD393A, and AD221A PCIe Combination 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet Cards

4
Recommended Use Based on Performance
and Design
The AD222A can be thought of as a combination of an HP AD355A 2-port 4-Gbit/s Fibre
Channel card connected by a PCIe to PCIe switch with an AD337A 2-port 1000Base-T
card and sharing a common PCIe
®
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 AD222A cards in the highest performing PCIe slots. Slots 5 and 6 are the
recommended high performance PCIe slots in the HP Integrity rx6600 used in our
performance testing.
• Set up a pair of cards for high availability as shown in Figure 4. On the first card,
configure 1 Fibre Channel port and 1 Gigabit Ethernet port as primary or active and
the second Fibre Channel port and Gigabit Ethernet port as alternates for the second
card. On the second card, configure 1 Fibre Channel port and 1 Gigabit Ethernet
port as primary or active and the second Fibre Channel port and Gigabit Ethernet port
as alternates for the first card. This setup would provide the best performance and high
availability. Achieving a similar level of high availability would require using twice the
number of AD355A (2-port 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel) or AD337A (2-port GigE) cards.
Figure 4: Setting Up a Pair of AD222A Cards for High Availability
ALT 1ALT 1 PRI 1 PRI 1
PRI 2PRI 2 ALT 2 ALT 2
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 AD222A, AD393A and AD221A provide
increased connectivity compared to other HP cards such as the AD355A, AD337A. Please