Target Fabrics; Infrastructure Architecture - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Specification

Figure 9. Fabric technology targets
Additionally, the design had to incur minimal additional cost for infrastructure to support fabrics yet to
be developed, leverage industry standard components, and interoperate with the dozens of
companies and multiple divisions involved.
Over its lifecycle, the BladeSystem c-Class architecture must support dozens of server blades, more
than 50 Mezzanine Cards (MEZZ) and I/O modules, and multiple enclosure designs.

Target fabrics

The HP BladeSystem provides high-speed interfaces between server blades and switch modules.
Server blades may contain components connected to the high-speed interfaces on their motherboards
or on mezzanine cards. The main high-speed interface is expected to be used for connecting server
blades to switch modules with high-speed differential signals. In various implementations, these
channels are used for routing Ethernet, Fibre Channel, or other types of signaling.

Infrastructure architecture

For single-wide switch modules, each main high-speed interface consists of a group of four pairs of
signals, available for use as two lanes (two transmit pairs and two receive pairs) connected to a
server blade. Additionally, for single-wide switch modules, there is also an inter-switch link available
that allows two adjacent switch modules to communicate for failover, connectivity, and so forth. It
consists of eight pairs of signals available for use as four lanes (four transmit pairs and four receive
pairs).
10