HP ProLiant G7 c-Class server blades with Intel® Xeon® processors

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traditional hard drives by eliminating seek times and by powering up quickly. They also achieve high

random-read performance. HP SSDs provide a level of reliability equivalent to or slightly greater than

current HP Midline disk drives for servers.

Solid state memory (NAND) technology, used on SSDs, provides higher capacity, reliability, and

performance for local, low-power boot drives than USB keys provide. HP server SSD interfaces are

compatible with traditional disk drives connected to a SATA or SAS controller. This allows

benchmarking and direct comparison of their external performance with that of disk drives to

determine their suitability in various application environments.

Optional mezzanine cards

HP ProLiant c-Class server blades use two types of mezzanine cards to connect to the various

interconnect fabrics such as Fibre Channel, Ethernet, serial-attached SCSI, or InfiniBand. Type I and

Type II mezzanine cards differ only in the amount of power allocated to them by the server and in the

physical space they occupy on the server blade. Type I mezzanine cards have slightly less power

available to them and are slightly smaller. Type I mezzanine cards are compatible with all mezzanine

connectors in ProLiant c-Class server blades. Type II mezzanine cards are compatible with Mezzanine

2 or 3 connectors in full-height c-Class server blades. Type II mezzanine cards are also compatible

with Mezzanine 2 connectors in half-height c-Class server blades.

Both types of mezzanine cards use a 450-pin connector, enabling up to eight lanes of differential

transmit and receive signals. Because the connections between the device bays and the interconnect

bays are hard-wired through the signal midplane, the mezzanine cards must be matched to the

appropriate type of interconnect module. For example, a Fibre Channel mezzanine card must be

placed in the mezzanine connector that connects to an interconnect bay holding a Fibre Channel

switch. For the most up-to-date information about the c-Class mezzanine card options, go to the HP

website:

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-interconnects.html and

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/vc-interconnects.html.

Networking technologies

Multifunction 1Gb or 10Gb Ethernet network adapters integrated on all c-Class server blades provide

several advantages

 TCP/IP Offload engine (TOE) for Microsoft® Windows® operating systems improves CPU

efficiency.

 Receive-side Scaling (RSS) for Windows dynamically load balances incoming traffic across all

processors in a server.

 iSCSI Acceleration (available on some integrated network adapters) offloads some of the work in

creating iSCSI packets from the processor onto the network controller, freeing up the processor for

other work.

 iSCSI boot for Linux® operating systems makes it possible to boot the server from a storage area

network (SAN) and eliminates the need for disk drives in a server.

 HP Virtual Connect (VC) and Flex 10 provide up to 16 FlexNICs across 4 ports to simplify server

connection setup and administration.

TCP/IP Offload Engine

he increased bandwidth of Gigabit Ethernet networks increases demand for CPU cycles to manage

the network protocol stack. This means that performance of even a fast CPU will degrade while

For more information about Solid

technology for ProLiant servers”:

state drive technology, refer to the HP technology brief titled “Solid state drive

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01580706/c01580706.pdf.

For complete specifications about HP network adapter products, go to www.hp.com/go/ProLiantNICs.