IBM recently released another Ethernet card that is worth mentioning. This card is different from previous Ethernet cards because it is the CFFh form factor instead of CFFv. If you are confused about the whole CFFv vs CFFh let me know, I am considering a post about this in the near future.
For now, suffice to say you can have a CFFv card and a CFFh card on the blade for a total of 2 expansion cards. You always had a lot of choices for CFFv but only one for CFFh (if you’re not going high speed!). The existing card was a dual port FC and dual port Ethernet combo card all in one. What if you didn’t need the FC ports? Up until now you were out of luck.
This is a nice addition for customers that need more Ethernet ports on a blade but didn’t want the FC ports.
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In an attempt to assist anyone bewildered by IBM’s acronym madness there is a very short description in the Bladecenter interop guide. It goes something like this.
aMM = Advanced Management Module
CFFh = Combo Form Factor Horizontal I/O Expansion Card
CFFv = Combo Form Factor Vertical I/O Expansion Card
cMM = Chassis Management Module
cMM2 = Chassis Management Module II
EC = I/O Expansion Card
HSEC = High Speed I/O Expansion Card
HSFF = High Speed Form Factor
LFF = HSEC Large Form Factor High Speed I/O Expansion Card
MSIM = Multi Switch Interconnect Module
NEBS = Network Equipment-Building System
OFM = Open Fabric Manager
OPM = Optical Pass-Thru Module
SFF = Small Form Factor (enables second HDD on select blade servers
SFF EC = Small Form Factor I/O Expansion Card
StFF = Standard Form Factor
Oops, just noticed you have posted the interop guide in the previous post down.
Handy it is
Dan - Thank you very much for posting that! Just in case somebody comes here first, that is a very nice table to have around. Thanks for coming by!