Resilience And Availability - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Introduction Manual

storage, or I/O option blades. With the advent of the high-density compute blades such as the
ProLiant BL2x220c, up to 32 server blades – each with 2 processors and up to 32 GB of memory for
the G5 product – can be housed in a c7000 enclosure.
The BladeSystem c-class architecture also provides scalable bandwidth. The NonStop signal midplane
is capable of conducting extremely high signal rates of up to 10 Gb/s per lane (that is, per set of four
differential transmit/receive traces). For example, in a c7000 enclosure fully configured with 16 half-
height server blades, the aggregate bandwidth is up to 5 Terabits/sec across the NonStop signal
midplane. 6 This is bandwidth between the device bays and interconnect bays only. It does not include
traffic between interconnect modules or blade-to-blade connections.
Using Virtual Connect Enterprise Manager (VCEM) software, administrators can scale server blade
management by pooling multiple enclosures and managing them together. VCEM is a software
application that provides management capabilities for up to 150 BladeSystem enclosures. VCEM
provides a central console to perform efficient administration of LAN and SAN connections, group-
based configuration management, plus the rapid assignment, movement and failover of server-to-
network connections and their workloads.

Resilience and availability

BladeSystem c-Class enclosures employ multiple signal paths and redundant hot-pluggable
components to provide maximum uptime for components in the enclosure. Independent signal and
power backplanes enable scalability, reliability, and flexibility. The NonStop signal midplane and
separate power backplane have no active components (Figure 5). Separating the high power delivery
in the backplane from the high speed interconnect signals in the midplane results in minimal thermal
stress to the signal midplane and high reliability.
Figure 5. HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure – side view
The enclosure also houses the Onboard Administrator modules that monitor power and thermal
conditions, ensure correct hardware configurations, simplify enclosure setup, and simplify network
Aggregate backplane bandwidth calculation: 160 Gb/s (half-height server blade) x 16 blades x 2 directions =
6
5.12 Terabits/s
10