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32 p5-570 Technical Overview and Introduction
2.7 External I/O subsystems
This section describes the external I/O subsystems, which include the 7311 I/O drawers and
the external storage solutions that p5-570 supports.
2.7.1 I/O drawers
As described in Chapter 1, “General description” on page 1, the p5-570 system has six
internal PCI-X slots. If more PCI-X slots are needed to dedicate more adapters to a partition
or to increase the bandwidth of network adapters, up to 20 7311 model D10, 7311 model D11,
and 7311 model D20 I/O drawers can be added to the p5-570 system.
The p5-570 building block system configures a default RIO-2 bus to connect the internal
PCI-X slots through the PCI-X to PCI-X bridges, and supports up to four external I/O drawers.
To support more I/O drawers in one p5-570 building block, the RIO-2 expansion card
(FC 1800) is needed. The RIO-2 expansion card supports up to four additional I/O drawers. If
the combined system is made of more than one p5-570 building block, the optional RIO-2
expansion card may be not required if I/O drawers can be shared between the default RIO-2
loop of the p5-570 building blocks.
2.7.2 7311 Model D10 and 7311 Model D11 I/O drawers
The 7311-D10 is not supported in p5-570 initial orders. Only an existing 7311-D10 drawers at
the customer site may be migrated from other systems to a p5-570. The 7311-D11 can be in
the initial order and it provides six additional PCI-X slots supporting an enhanced blind-swap
mechanism. That is the first difference between the two I/O drawer models. The other
difference is that the 7311-D11 has six slots that are PCI-X capable, and the D10 has five
PCI-X capable slots and one PCI slot. The two types of blind-swap cassette mechanisms are
unique for any I/O drawer model; therefore you cannot move a blind-swap cassette from a
D10 to a D20 or from a D20 to a D10. Drawers must have a RIO-2 adapter to connect to the
server.
Each primary PCI-X bus is connected to a PCI-X-to-PCI-X bridge, which provides three slots
with Extended Error Handling (EEH) for error recovering. In the 7311 Model D10 I/O drawer,
slot 1 is a standard PCI slot, which operates at 33 MHz and 5 V signaling. In the 7311 Model
D11 I/O drawer, slots 1 to 6 are PCI-X slots that operate at 133 MHz and 3.3 V signaling.
Figure 2-10 shows a conceptual diagram of the 7311 Model D10 I/O drawer.