Mar 13, 2023
I/O drawers – Introduction to Power E1080
1.6 I/O drawers
If more PCIe slots beyond the system node slots are required, the Power E1080 server supports adding I/O expansion drawers.
At initial availability zero, one, two, three, or four PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawers per system node are supported. To connect an I/O expansion drawer, a PCIe slot is used to attach a 6-slot expansion module in the I/O drawer. A PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer (#EMX0) holds two expansion modules that are attached to any two PCIe slots in the same system node or in different system nodes.
For the connection of SAS disks, a disk-only I/O drawer is available. The EXP24SX is the only disk drawer that is supported.
1.6.1 PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer
The 19-inch 4 EIA (4U) PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer (#EMX0) and two PCIe Fanout Modules (#EMXH) provide 12 PCIe I/O full-length, full-height slots. One Fanout Module provides six PCIe slots that are labeled C1 – C6. C1 and C4 are x16 slots, and C2, IBM C3®, C5, and C6 are x8 slots. PCIe Gen1, Gen2, and Gen 3 full-high adapters are supported.
A blind-swap cassette (BSC) is used to house the full-high adapters that are installed in these slots. The BSC is the same BSC that is used with the previous generation server’s 12X attached I/O drawers (#5802, #5803, #5877, and #5873). The drawer is shipped with a full set of BSCs, even if the BSCs are empty.
Concurrent repair and adding or removing PCIe adapters is done through HMC-guided menus or by operating system support utilities.
A PCIe CXP converter adapter and Active Optical Cables (AOCs) connect the system node to a PCIe Fanout Module in the I/O expansion drawer. Each PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer has two power supplies.
Drawers can be added to the server later, but system downtime must be scheduled for adding a PCIe Gen 3 Optical Cable Adapter or a PCIe Gen 3 I/O drawer (#EMX0) or Fanout Module.
Figure 1-8 shows a PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer.
Figure 1-8 PCIe Gen 3 I/O Expansion Drawer
26 IBM Power E1080: Technical Overview and Introduction
The AOC cable feature codes are listed in Table 1-16. Also listed is the supported order type. The feature codes that are associated to cables that support RPO only are not available for new orders or MES upgrades. Instead, they are used to manage the migration of supported I/O expansion drawers from previous IBM POWER® technology-based servers to the
Power E1080. Feature codes that are associated to cables with longer length are required to support inter-rack connection between the system node and I/O expansion drawer.
Table 1-16 Active Optical Cables feature codes
Careful balancing of I/O, assigning adapters through redundant EMX0 expansion drawers, and connectivity to different system nodes can ensure high-availability for I/O resources assigned to LPARs.
