First of all, if you are not too sure on what HP's Flex technology is, here is a very basic overview. On the BL460 G6 servers for example the on board NIC card is dual port 10GbE Ethernet card, but it has HP’s "Flex" technology incorportated. If this is used in conjunction with a Flex 10 interconnect module in the chassis, the 10GbE connection can be split up into smaller 1GbE Ethernet connections which is very useful for Virtualisation environments.
So what is this “FlexFabric” technology i hear you ask? Well in a nutshell it is a Flex 10GbE network card as described above but with added fibre channel over Ethernet for connectivity to a fibre channel SAN.
So what does this mean for you? Well using the FlexFabric chassis interconnects and NIC cards means you can cut down on the number of interconnects and additional mezzanine cards needed in a HP server blade chassis and blade servers. You see all of Ethernet and SAN connections are handled by the on-board card and therefore will come from just the one interconnect (or two depending if your using the C7000) thus lowering complexity, wasted ports, power and space inside the blades.
Regards
Technical ISS Solutions Team
