Solid State Drives; Optional Mezzanine Cards; Networking Technologies - HP BL680c - ProLiant - G5 Configuration

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 numbers of spindles.

Solid state drives

HP server solid state drives (SSD) were introduced 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 offers a variety of optional mezzanine cards to connect to outside networks and storage. HP
ProLiant c-Class server blades use two types of mezzanine cards that 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/components/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.
• Receive-side Scaling (RSS) for Windows dynamically load balances incoming traffic across all
processors in a server.
• iSCSI Acceleration (available on some integrated network adapters) offloads some of the work in
creating iSCSI packets from the processor onto the network controller, freeing up the processor for
other work.
9 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.
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