A6826A HP PCI-X 2-Channel 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel Adapter

A6826A is a dual-channel 2 Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapter for 64-bit, 133 MHz PCI-X, with short-wave LC connectors, used on Integrity servers running HP-UX or 64-bit Linux. It is built on the ISP2312 chip, which combines a RISC processor, a Fibre Channel protocol manager with 2 Gb transceivers and a PCI or PCI-X bus interface; the link negotiates 1 Gbps or 2 Gbps. The card is backward compatible to PCI, uses 3.3 V power with 3.3 V and 5 V tolerant signaling in a universal PCI slot, and connects only through short-wave multimode fibre. Its exchange board is A6826-69002.

Measured on an rx4640 in a PCI-X 133 MHz slot, one port at 2 Gb/s reads at 195 MB/s and writes at 186 MB/s; both ports reach 390 MB/s read and 372 MB/s write. One port delivers 35,180 read and 20,619 write IOPS, and two ports 70,032 read and 41,221 write. Bidirectional throughput is 370 MB/s on one port and 720 MB/s on two. On the other Integrity servers tested (rx2600, rx7620, rx8620 and Superdome) performance scales linearly up to four adapters with all eight ports running at 2 Gb/s.

The adapter handles FCP-SCSI, IP and FC-VI protocols with private loop direct attach, fabric loop attach and point-to-point fabric login, and complies with PCI 2.2, PCI-X 1.0, FC-PH-3 and FC-AL-2. It carries 256 KB of RAM (scalable to 4 MB), 256 KB of NVRAM and 128 KB of flash in two banks. The board is 17.78 cm by 10.67 cm and draws about 4.75 W for a single channel and 10.5 W for dual. The green LED signals 2 Gb and the amber LED 1 Gb.

On 64-bit Itanium Linux the qualified software is qla2300 driver 6.06.50 with efiutil 1.05, on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8; booting from the SAN is not supported in that release. The cards fit the HP 9000 rp3410 and the HP Integrity rx2600, among other HP-UX servers.