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what are the backplane connectivity options for this card? though it is said for blades, we got this on a Dell PE C2100 rack...now there are two holes (ports) on servers backplane gazing at me...clueless what to do?

please advise

http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/networking/nic-intel-ethernet-x520-kx4/pd.aspx?refid=nic-intel-ethernet-x520-kx4&cs=555&s=biz

JMS77
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  • Are you sure you've got the right product there? How do you know that that's the exact same card? – Mark Henderson May 23 '11 at 08:54
  • the card specs are printed on the bill of material/invoice – JMS77 May 23 '11 at 09:17
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    that doesn't always mean they're correct though, I'd definately be double checking, because a blade NIC has no place inside anywhere but a blade – Mark Henderson May 23 '11 at 10:26
  • I'm not going to open up one of our blades and check because I don't have any spares right now and I've got better things to do than cause myself a major outage today, but iirc the physical format of a mezzanine card means it physically wouldn't fit in a normal rack mount server. It _definitely_ would not expose any ports in the server's external ports. – Rob Moir May 23 '11 at 12:42

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Let me see if I've got this straight: This part, which is certainly for blade servers, has been installed into a rack server.

Did Dell recommend this? If so, I'd be inclined to ask them how they think you should connect this. AFAIK this is indeed a blade part, so won't have a direct network interface of its own and is instead designed to add certain network connectivity options to a blade server via its backbone connector.

Rob Moir
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  • Correct, there's no physical interface on the mezzanine, as it lets the blade chassis decide which interface to connect to it. – Mark Henderson May 23 '11 at 08:53
  • oh is it? but this came thruough a Dell build. Thanks for the info – JMS77 May 23 '11 at 09:16
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    Are you sure it's the mezzanine card? Intel x510-10 comes in a number of models. 10Gbase-T, SFP+, SR etc. Most would fit in the C2100 but not the mezzanine card. What does the two ports look like? – HampusLi May 23 '11 at 10:04
  • this certainly not 10Gbase-T. The ports are looking like SFP, but empty without the modules. – JMS77 May 23 '11 at 10:55
  • In that case, John, it sounds like SFP+ copper/direct attached interfaces (http://bit.ly/mRot4Y for an example) which is what I'd expect, what we use where I work in fact, we have Dell servers too. You can either use those with a fibre transceiver, or with a copper "direct attach" cable. Possibly the Intel X520-DA2 card or a variant of that, I forget the exact Dell part number for it. – Rob Moir May 23 '11 at 11:17