Backplanes | Midplanes | Risers

A backplane is an electronic circuit board containing circuitry and sockets into which additional electronic devices on other circuit boards or cards can be plugged; in a computer, generally synonymous with or part of the motherboard.Backplanes are essential pieces of equipment for your configuration. They provide extra circuitry and sockets for multiple electronic devices to connect with other boards or for other devices to be plugged, including networking cards, hard drives, and more.

Backplanes/midplanes connect boards together, and distribute power and data between the connected parts

Midplanes are often used in computers, mostly in blade servers, where server blades reside on one side and the peripheral (power, networking, and other I/O) and service modules reside on the other. Midplanes are also popular in networking and telecommunications equipment where one side of the chassis accepts system processing cards and the other side of the chassis accepts network interface cards.

Alternatively, a Riser Card is an expansion card that is used to extend a slot for an I/O card in a fully loaded computer to make room to plug it in. It may also refer to a card that contains several slots used in low-profile, space-saving enclosure. The I/O cards are plugged into the riser card and reside parallel with the motherboard.

Tekmart stocks several kinds of backplanes or midplanes for sale, compatible with various systems and brands, for example SCSI backplanes, disc backplanes, power distribution boards, midplane board assemblies, logic centerplanes, and so on. We have backplanes and midplanes from SUN, IBM, Dell, and many more. 

Contact us at support@tekmart.co.za or on 0861 711 712 (within RSA) or +2711 027 6793 (international) for your backplane/midplane/riser replacement parts requirement(s) for your server and our consultants will gladly assist you. 

Figure 1: Sample representation of a backplane; parts available at Tekmart Africa