Technologies in HP ProLiant G6 c-Class server blades with AMD Opteron™ processors

SAS and SATA Small Form Factor hard drives

HP Smart Array technology enables system designs that deploy high performance SAS and high-

capacity SATA

SFF drives. This capability provides a broad range of storage solutions that give IT

managers the flexibility to choose storage devices based on reliability, performance, and cost.

SFF drives provide higher performance than large form factor drives. The smaller SFF platters reduce

seek times because the heads have a shorter distance to travel. RAID performance improves by

increasing the number of spindles.

Solid state drives

HP introduced server solid state drives (SSD) in late 2008 for use in specific BladeSystem

environments. SSDs connect to the host system using the same protocols as disk drives, but they store

and retrieve file data in flash memory arrays rather than on spinning media. SSDs eliminate the

latency of 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) 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 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/compon

ents/c-class-interconnects.html.

Networking technologies

Multifunction 1 Gb or 10 Gb 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.

For more information about these features, refer to the technology brief “Serial ATA technology”:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00301688/c00301688.pdf.

For more information about Solid state drive technology, refer to the HP technology brief titled “Solid state drive

technology for ProLiant servers”:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs

/support/SupportManual/c01580706/c01580706.pdf.