Storage Fabrics; Storage Fabric; Power Distribution; Fabric-C Iom Interconnect - Dell PowerEdge MX7000 Manual

6

Storage fabrics

The following sections contain information about Dell EMC PowerEdge MX7000 storage fabrics.

Storage fabric

Power distribution

The internal connection of the storage subsystem in the MX7000 enclosure is referred to as Fabric C. This fabric is connected on the
Main DB between sleds in the front of the MX7000 enclosure and I/O modules in the rear. The primary use cases for this fabric will
be for SAS or Fibre Channel storage connectivity, however other technologies could utilize this interconnect in the future.
Each compute sled can support a Fabric-C Mezz card, which connects to each IOM through a x4 link. The SAS Fabric-C IOMs
provide flexible SAS switching between compute sleds and internal storage sleds (MX5016s) connected to the MX7000 enclosure.
The fibre channel IOMs provide connectivity between compute sleds and external storage.

Fabric-C IOM interconnect

There are several connections on the Main DB to enable communication between the IOMs. Between each pair of IOMs (C1 and
C2), there is a link for intermodule communication. This link supports a x1 connection with each lane operating up to 10 Gbps per
direction. In addition , there are also handshake signals between the two modules to facilitate redundancy/failover or other module to
module communication. The usage of these interconnects depends on the IOM design and its particular requirements.
19