HP’s Industry Leading Blade New Virtual Connect Interconnect: “Virtual Connect Flex-Fabric 20/40 F8 Module”

A new addition to The Power of One solution from HP, by the Announcement of the new HP Virtual Connect Flex-Fabric 20/40 F8 Module for HP Blade System, as well as 2 new HP Flex-Fabric dual-port 20Gb 630 series Adapters for HP Blade system.

The new VC Flex-Fabric module would allow customers to simultaneously stream all movies and TV shows on Netflix in High Definition(HD) on a single 40GbE port.

The new VC Flex-Fabric 20/40 F8 Module delivers:

1. Industry First and ONLY adapters to stream converged 10Gb Ethernet and 8Gb Fiber Channel storage simultaneously over Native 20Gb KR2-based ports, thus maximizing Network Investment.
2. 4x Increase in uplink bandwidth and 2.3x increase in aggregated bandwidth with the first VC module to deliver 40Gb Ethernet connectivity.
3. Latency Reduction up to 73% resulting in increase of workload efficiency.

The new Virtual Connect has a simplified and intuitive Graphical User Interface and set-up Wizards, Embedded SNMP v1 and v2, in addition to the Command Line Interface.

Also it supports that any uplink can be used as a dedicated mirrored port from the server port(s).

The VC new module supports as its previous VC Flex-Fabric 24port modules the most common Data Center protocols: Ethernet, Fiber Channel, and Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and accelerated  iSCSI Connections.

It optimizes the hypervisor I/O requirements with Flex-10 and Flex-20 Adapters, with 2 modules you can provide six Flex-NICs and Two Flex-HBA connection to each server, delivering best practice network Configuration for most Hypervisors.

Virtual Connect Flex-Fabric 20/40 F8 is 100% compatible with current networks and will  avoid having to replace each piece of equipments.

the New Virtual Connect is delivered with the backward compatibility to previous Flex-Fabric LOMs and FLBs, and with 2 new Adapters that supports its capabilities:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. HP Flex-Fabric 20Gb 2-port 630 FLB Adapter 700065-B21
2. HP Flex-Fabric 20Gb 2-port 630 M Adapter 700076-B21

Each Flex-Fabric 20Gb adapter replaces a 10Gb NIC, and 8Gb FC HBA, simplifying I/O hardware by 50% and reducing cost 60%, thus:

1. a. Remove server I/O  bottlenecks.
2. b. one 20GbAdapter provide 35% CPU improvement over 10Gb adapter.
3. c. Transfer rate of 2ports each at 40Gbps full duplex and port speed of 20Gb.
4. d. Compatible operating systems:
   • Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP2, R2 w/SP1 (x86 and x64)
   • Microsoft Windows Server 2012 & 2012 R2
   • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (x86 and x64) 5.9,5.10,6.4, 6.5
   • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11, SP2 & SP3 x86 & x64
   • Solaris 10 U10
   • Solaris 11 x64
   • VMware ESXi 5.0 U3, 5.1 U2
   • VMware vSphere 5.5
   • Citrix XenServer 6.1

Adapter firmware updates on multiple blade servers with HP Smart Update Manager (SUM) is supported for these Adapters.

In addition to this, it is highly noticeable that these adapters will be enabled under the condition of using the Virtual Connect new Firmware 4.20