IBM #EJ16 PCIe3 LP CAPI Fibre Channel Flash Accelerator Adapter for 8247

IBM feature #EJ16 is the PCIe3 LP CAPI Fibre Channel Flash Accelerator Adapter, a short, low-profile PCIe generation 3 adapter for the 8247 POWER8 servers. It acts as a co-processor for the POWER8 processor and is built to offload CPU access to external Fibre Channel flash storage. The adapter carries a programmable CAPI Fibre Channel offload Accelerator Functional Unit and needs a direct-attach, point-to-point 8 Gb Fibre Channel link to the external storage. Features #EJ16, #EJ17 and #EJ18 are electronically identical and differ only in the tailstock bracket.

The adapter needs one PCIe x16 low-profile slot with both 3.3 V and 12 V power, and the slot must be a direct host-bus slot. One adapter per processor is supported in the system, and the adapter cannot be replaced with the power turned on. Its adapter FRU number is 00NK025. One or more 4096-byte sector logical unit numbers must be provisioned, and the adapter and its software libraries do not function with 512-byte sector LUNs.

Operation needs the IBM Data Engine for NoSQL software packages for CAPI Flash exploitation, installed as a matched pair with the adapter microcode, and mismatched levels can produce Back Level AFU warnings in the Linux syslog at boot. Linux kernel 3.x handles virtual LUN use, while Linux kernel 4.2 or later is needed for fine-grained multipathing, multiple LUN support and persistent storage. Supported Linux levels are Ubuntu 14.10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 or later.