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Our dealer currently has a killer deal on HP LeftHand P4000 starter kits and we're considering purchasing one or two of them; however each chassis only has 2x 1GbE ethernet. This seems a bit light on to me. HP don't seem to offer anything but 10GbE upgrades.

Is it possible to install a 4-Port PCI-e NIC into these chassis and have it work with the software?

Mark Henderson
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It may work with the software, but due to the way bonding works with LeftHand units, you're not going to see more than 1-Gigabit per LUN anyway. What do you think you need in terms of storage networking? If you care about per-LUN throughput, 10GbE is the right solution.

Since you'll be doing iSCSI MPIO, it's not as though you'd get a bigger bonded link by adding more interfaces. LeftHand scales by adding nodes.

ewwhite
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  • Basically I know that the unit can pump out way more than the 1Gbps limit, and I was hoping to find a way to tap into additional bandwidth in the unit should we saturate the links it comes with. I guess I'm used to Dell hardware that has more network ports than you can poke a stick at. – Mark Henderson Sep 25 '12 at 05:29
  • 10GbE ;) Make the jump! – ewwhite Sep 25 '12 at 05:34
  • Heh. We have some 10Gb equallogic gear, this budget doesn't quite extend that far though. – Mark Henderson Sep 25 '12 at 12:23