HP 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
Daily Archives: October 28, 2015
5 Modes of the Dell FN IO Module
Dell’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.