One of the most interesting things about the Intel Nehalem launch that was done at IBM was the full fledge embrace of the UEFI firmware. Almost a year ahead of the rest of the competition. In both the System x and BladeCenter space if it has Nehalem in it, it has UEFI as the firmware.

This introduces challenges to your I/O card vendors as they need to support it. There are two ways to do this, the right way, or, the wrong way. The right way involves the simple term HID. Human Interface Device. It’s a fancy engineering term for ‘make it easy to use’. One of the challenges about I/O devices in general is that the way they interact typically is not with easy to use/remember numbers. Whether it’s an IP address, a World Wide Name, or a hexadecimal memory range these aren’t things you easily remember.One of the largest issues when you get into the Fibre Channel world when it comes to HID issues is setting up a boot from SAN infrastructure. Outside of tools designed to automate this when you’re sitting in front of a computer you are presented with a very limited number of options when it comes to figuring out what your card’s WWN is and whether or not it can see the storage to boot from.

There are some hacks you can do where you can auto-scan and try to boot from the first thing you find. That might be fine if you’re playing around in a lab but when it comes to a production environment that’s not always a good thing. You really need to have the ability to turn on the system, search your FC network, find the device and match it to your adapter. Something a lot of us have taken for granted because every time you hit Alt-E/Ctrl-E and entered the adapter BIOS to do this.

What’s different with UEFI now is that all adapter BIOS and system BIOS are handled through a ‘main menu’ of sorts. You hit F1 on a system and now you’re presented with every ROM in the system from a main menu. The standard ‘BIOS’ things of the system are there. but now you have additional menu options that are the ROMs of the adapters.

That is, if you pay attention to the HID.

With out the HID, you get an interface that makes the Unix command line structure almost intuitive by comparison. While this may offer you ‘robust configuration options’ (aka tech speak for ‘make it impossible to do things quick & easy) at the end of the day 99% of the time you go into the firmware of a storage adapter you need to do two things. Find the storage LUN, and attach to it.

Emulex Labs will be soon posting a walk through video of how we’ve listened to our customers and made sure our UEFI integration is second to none on the BladeCenter HS22 and the 3550/3650 M2 systems that now support UEFI.

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