Internal tape drives
The server does not support an internal tape drive. However, it can be attached to external tape drives using Fibre
Channel connectivity.
Optical drives
The server does not support an internal optical drive option, however, you can connect an external USB optical
drive. See
http://support.lenovo.com/en/documents/pd011281
for information about available external optical
drives from Lenovo.
Note: The USB port on the compute nodes supply up to 0.5 A at 5 V. For devices that require more power, an
additional power source will be required.
Embedded 10Gb Virtual Fabric
Some models of the x440 include two Embedded 10Gb Virtual Fabric controllers (VFA, also known as LAN on
Motherboard (LOM)) built into the system board. Table 2 lists what models of the x440 include the Embedded 10Gb
Virtual Fabric controllers. Each x440 model that includes the embedded 10 Gb also has the Compute Node Fabric
Connector installed in each of I/O connectors 1 and 3 (and physically screwed onto the system board) to provide
connectivity to the Enterprise Chassis midplane.
The Fabric Connector enables port 1 of each embedded 10 Gb controller to be routed to I/O module bay 1 and port
2 of each controller to be routed to I/O module bay 2. The Fabric Connectors can be unscrewed and removed, if
required, to allow the installation of an I/O adapter on I/O connector 1 and 3.
The Embedded 10Gb controllers are based on the Emulex BladeEngine 3 (BE3), which is a single-chip, dual-port 10
Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) Ethernet Controller. Here are some of the features of the Embedded 10Gb controller:
PCI-Express Gen2 x8 host bus interface
Supports connection to 10 Gb and 1 Gb Flex System Ethernet switches
Supports multiple virtual NIC (vNIC) functions
TCP/IP Offload Engine (TOE enabled)
SRIOV capable
RDMA over TCP/IP capable
iSCSI and FCoE upgrade offering via FoD
The following table lists the ordering information for the Virtual Fabric Advanced Software Upgrade (LOM), which
enables the iSCSI and FCoE support on the Embedded 10Gb Virtual Fabric controller. To upgrade both controllers,
you need two FoD licenses.
Table 12. Feature on Demand upgrade for FCoE and iSCSI support
Part number
Feature code
Description
Maximum
supported
90Y9310
A2TD
Virtual Fabric Advanced Software Upgrade (LOM)
2
I/O expansion options
The x440 has four I/O expansion connectors for attaching I/O adapter cards, as shown in Figure 6. There is a fifth
expansion connector (under I/O adapter 4) designed for future expansion options. The I/O expansion connector is a
Flex System x440 Compute Node (7917)
20
