HP BladeSystem Networking Interconnects

HP BladeSystem Networking Interconnects

Networking interconnects, network interconnects, Ethernet interconnects…no matter what verbiage you’d like to assign them, the main point is that they allow your servers to network to an external network such as your company network or even the ultimate network – the world wide web. The HP BladeSystem line of networking interconnects is engineered to plug into both the c3000 and c7000 models of HP BladeSystem c-Class blade enclosures. The network interconnects plug into the back of the blade enclosures by means of multiple interconnect bays. Since there are multiple bays available, up to 8 for the c7000 and 4 for the c3000, that means that the networking interconnects can increase or decrease as a reflection of your enterprise data center requirements. And THAT means that the HP networking interconnects offer not only a connection to the outside world, but the flexibility to determine the strength of that connection as you will.

Not only does the enterprise IT environment that the network interconnects will be used within affect the number of interconnects, but it also affects several other aspects of their design. For instance, if an HP BladeSystem networking interconnect was to be used within a branch office, it would be integrated with different features than if it were to be used within an enterprise data center. This is possible because HP Ethernet interconnects are able to feature a wide range of capabilities. Some of these capabilities include the ability to offer either 1 Gigabit (Gb) or 10 Gb Ethernet capabilities, as well as being able to offer support for numerous different protocols such as NFS, NDMP, HTTP, FTP, WebDAV, and SMB/CIFS. Another aspect that affects the networking interconnect is the type of blade server that they are used to network, which has an even wider range of possibilities since they work with blade servers from both the HP ProLiant and the HP Integrity product lines – neither of which are exactly lacking in model options.