IBM System z10 EC Reference Manual

Also see for System z10 EC: Reference guide

Contents

15The z10 EC contains an I/O subsystem infrastructurewhich uses an I/O cage that provides 28 I/O slots and theability to have one to three I/O cages delivering a total of84 I/O slots. ESCON, FICON Express4, FICON Express2,FICON Express, OSA-Express3 LR, OSA-Express2, andCrypto Express2 features plug into the z10 EC I/O cagealong with any ISC-3s and InfiniBand Multiplexer (IFB-MP) cards. All I/O features and their support cards canbe hot-plugged in the I/O cage. Installation of an I/Ocage remains a disruptive MES, so the Plan Ahead fea-ture remains an important consideration when ordering az10 EC system. Each model ships with one I/O cage asstandard in the A-Frame (the A-Frame also contains theCentral Electronic Complex [CEC] cage where the booksreside) and any additional I/O cages are installed in theZ-Frame. Each IFB-MP has a bandwidth up to 6 GigaBytesper second (GB/sec) for I/O domains and MBA fanoutcards provide 2.0 GB/sec for ICB-4s.The z10 EC continues to support all of the featuresannounced with the System z9 EC such as:• Logical Channel Subsystems (LCSSs) and support forup to 60 logical partitions• Increased number of Subchannels (63.75k)• Multiple Subchannel Sets (MSS)• Redundant I/O Interconnect• Physical Channel IDs (PCHIDs)• System Initiated CHPID Reconfiguration• Logical Channel SubSystem (LCSS) SpanningESCON ChannelsThe z10 EC supports up to 1,024 ESCON channels. Thehigh density ESCON feature has 16 ports, 15 of whichcan be activated for customer use. One port is alwaysreserved as a spare which is activated in the event of afailure of one of the other ports. For high availability theinitial order of ESCON features will deliver two 16-portESCON features and the active ports will be distributedacross those features.Fibre Channel ConnectivityThe on demand operating environment requires fast dataaccess, continuous data availability, and improved flexibil-ity, all with a lower cost of ownership. The four port FICONExpress4 and FICON Express2 features available on thez9 EC continue to be supported on the System z10 EC.FICON Express4 ChannelsThe z10 EC supports up to 336 FICON Express4 chan-nels, each one operating at 1, 2 or 4 Gb/sec auto-negoti-ated. The FICON Express4 features are available in longwavelength (LX) and short wavelength (SX). For customersexploiting LX, there are two options available for unre-peated distances of up to 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) or up to10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Both LX features use 9 micronsingle mode fiber optic cables. The SX feature uses 50or 62.5 micron multimode fiber optic cables. Each FICONExpress4 feature has 4 independent channels (ports) andcan be configured to carry native FICON traffic or FibreChannel (SCSI) traffic. LX and SX cannot be intermixed ona single feature. The receiving devices must correspond tothe appropriate LX or SX feature. The maximum number ofFICON Express4 features is 84 using three I/O cages.z10 EC I/O Subsystem z10 EC Channels and I/O Connectivity