I/O Drawer - IBM z13s Technical Manual

4.3 I/O drawer

The I/O drawer is five EIA units high, and supports up to eight I/O feature cards. Each I/O
drawer supports two I/O domains (A and B) for a total of eight I/O card slots. Each I/O domain
uses an InfiniBand Multiplexer (IFB-MP) card in the I/O drawer and a copper cable to connect
to a host channel adapter (HCA) fanout in the CPC drawer.
The link between the HCA in the CPC drawer and the IFB-MP in the I/O drawer supports a
link rate of up to 6 GBps. All cards in the I/O drawer are installed horizontally. Two distributed
converter assemblies (DCAs) distribute power to the I/O drawer.
The locations of the DCAs, I/O feature cards, and IFB-MP cards in the I/O drawer are shown
in Figure 4-1.
Figure 4-1 I/O drawer
The I/O structure in a z13s CPC is illustrated in Figure 4-2 on page 143. An IFB cable
connects the HCA fanout card in the CPC drawer to an IFB-MP card in the I/O drawer. The
passive connection between two IFB-MP cards is a design of redundant I/O interconnection
(RII). This design provides connectivity between an HCA fanout card and I/O cards during
concurrent fanout card or IFB cable replacement. The IFB cable between an HCA fanout card
and each IFB-MP card supports a 6 GBps link rate.
Carry-forward only: Only one I/O drawer is supported in z13s servers on a carry-forward
basis and can host only FICON Express8 cards (up to eight).
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IBM z13s Technical Guide