HP BladeSystem Networking Interconnects

HP BladeSystem Network Interconnects

An HP BladeSystem networking interconnect, or an Ethernet interconnect, is specifically engineered for HP BladeSystem c-Class blade enclosures, which include the c3000 and the c7000. Basically, they network your servers to an outside network, whether it is your company network or the Internet. HP BladeSystem network interconnects provide solutions for a wide range of applications, depending on the environment that the interconnect will be used within. For instance, networking interconnects designed for data centers offer different advantages versus those designed for branch offices. The HP BladeSystem blade enclosures help to enable these differing advantages, and one way in which they accomplish this is through the number of bays that they offer. By offering multiple bays through which interconnects can be plugged into the blade enclosure, they allow users to plug in however many network interconnects that they need (up to 8 with a c7000 and 4 with a c3000) based on the needs of the IT environment.

Since they are designed to work with the HP BladeSystem c-Class 7000 and 3000 blade enclosures, HP BladeSystem network interconnects also work with specific types of blade servers – up to 16 of them. These blade servers are a part of the HP ProLiant BL series and as well as the HP Integrity blade server series and are the only two types of blades that can be put into a c7000 or c3000 blade enclosure. However, that still gives quite a product range given that the HP ProLiant BL series contains more than 10 different types of server, and the HP Integrity blade server series contains a comparable amount. As a result, the networking interconnects require a range of capabilities to deal with such a range of blade servers, and offer the option of 1 Gigabit (Gb) or 10 Gb Ethernet, with support for multiple protocols including SMB/CIFS, NFS, NDMP, HTTP, FTP, and WebDAV.