Specifications

Chapter 4. Product information and technology 99
4.9 I/O adapters
The networking subsystem of the IBM Flex System Enterprise Chassis is
designed to provide increased bandwidth and flexibility. The new design also
allows for more ports on the available expansion adapters, which allow for
greater flexibility and efficiency with your system’s design.
4.9.1 I/O adapter slots
There are two I/O adapter slots on the p260 and the p24L. The p460 has four I/O
adapter slots.
The key differences from IBM BladeCenter are:
򐂰 The I/O adapter slots on IBM Flex System nodes are identical in shape
(form factor).
򐂰 The I/O adapters for the Power Systems compute nodes have their own
connector that plugs into the IBM Flex System Enterprise Chassis midplane.
򐂰 There is no onboard network capability in the Power Systems compute nodes
other than the Flexible Service Processor (FSP) NIC interface.
We describe the reference codes associated with the physical adapter slots in
more detail in “Assigning physical I/O” on page 301.
Tip: Depending on your RAID configuration, you might need to create the
array before you install the operating system in the compute node. Before you
can create a RAID array, you must reformat the drives so that the sector size
of the drives changes from 512 bytes to 528 bytes.
If you later decide to remove the drives, delete the RAID array before you
remove the drives. If you decide to delete the RAID array and reuse the
drives, you might need to reformat the drives so that the sector size of the
drives changes from 528 bytes to 512 bytes.