IBM Flex System FC3171 8Gb SAN Switch and Pass-thru
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The connections between the adapters installed in the compute nodes to the switch bays in the chassis
are shown diagrammatically in the following figure. The figure shows both half-wide servers, such as the
x240 with two adapters, and full-wide servers, such as the p460 with four adapters.
Figure 3. Logical layout of the interconnects between I/O adapters and I/O modules
The IBM Flex System FC3171 8Gb SAN Switch and Pass-thru can be installed in bays 1, 2, 3, and 4 of
the Enterprise chassis. Supported adapter card must be installed in a corresponding slot of the compute
node (slot A1 when switches are installed in bays 1 and 2 or slot A2 when switches are in bays 3 and 4).
With compute nodes that have an integrated dual-port 10 GbE network interface controller (NIC) these
switches can only be installed in bays 3 and 4 because integrated NICs ports are routed to bays 1 and 2
with a specialized periscope connector and the FC adapter card cannot be installed in slot A1. However,
when needed, the periscope connector can be replaced with an FC adapter card, in which case integrated
NIC will be disabled and FC switches can be used in bays 1 and 2.
