Daily Archives: October 28, 2015

HP Introduces M.2 SSDs for Blade Servers

HP M2 Solid State Enablement Kit for BladesHP recently announced the industry’s first M.2 SSD for blade servers.  If you’re not familiar with M.2 (pronounced M dot 2), it’s a small form factor card and connector supporting applications such as Wi-Fi, WWAN, USB, PCIe & SATA seen mostly in desktop / laptop systems.  Adoption of this form factor in Tier 1 vendors is slow coming, which is why this is a big announcement for HP.  Since this plugs into the system board, it avoids traversing the SAS mid-plane and allows for connectivity to the system PCIe bus supporting faster speeds (see below for details.) Continue reading

5 Modes of the Dell FN IO Module

Dell FN IO Module for FX2 ChassisDell’s FN I/O Modules (FN IOMs) are integrated devices that sit in the rear of the FX2 chassis and behave like traditional network switches.  The FN IOMs provide 8 x 10GbE internal ports to the connected server nodes while offering 4 x 10GbE external links for upstream connectivity.  What makes the FN I/O Module unique is that it supports 5 operational modes: Standalone (SMUX), VLT, Stacking, Programmable MUX (PMUX) and Full-switch.  Below are details on each of these modes.

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