A Future-Proof Investment
The Cisco Unified Computing System gives data centers room to scale while anticipating future technology developments, helping increase return on investment today while protecting that investment over time. The blade server chassis, power supplies, and midplane are capable of handling future servers with even greater processing capacity; future, higher-power CPUs; and future 40 Gigabit Ethernet standards that are expected to bring a total of 80 Gbps of bandwidth to each half-width blade server.
System Overview
From a high-level perspective, the Cisco Unified Computing System consists of one or two Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects and one or more Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis populated with Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers. Cisco UCS Manager is embedded in the fabric interconnects, and it supports all server chassis as a single, redundant management domain.
Each chassis requires at least one 10 Gigabit unified fabric connection to a Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect. A maximum configuration would occupy all 40 fixed ports of a redundant pair of Cisco UCS 6140XP Fabric Interconnects with 40 blade server chassis and a total of up to 320 blade servers. A typical configuration would have 2 to 4 unified fabric connections from each chassis to each of an active-active pair of switches.
For example, Figure 2 illustrates 36 blade server chassis connected to an active-active pair of fabric interconnects that support failover. Uplinks from the two fabric interconnects deliver LAN traffic to the LAN aggregation or core layer and SAN traffic through native Fibre Channel to either of SAN A or SAN B.
Figure 3 shows the components that make up the Cisco Unified Computing System:
● The unified fabric is supported by Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects. The figure shows a Cisco UCS 6120XP Fabric Interconnect with 20 fixed ports and one expansion module slot.
● Cisco UCS Manager runs within the two Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects and manages the system as a single, unified, management domain. The management software is deployed in a clustered active-passive configuration so that the management plane remains intact even through the failure of an interconnect.
● The unified fabric is extended to each of up to 40 blade chassis through up to two Cisco UCS 2100 Series Fabric Extenders per blade chassis, each supporting up to four unified fabric connections. Each chassis must have at least one connection to a parent Cisco UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnect.
● Up to eight Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers can be installed in a Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis. The chassis supports half-width and full-width blades. Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers use Intel Xeon 5500 Series processors that deliver intelligent performance, automated energy efficiency, and flexible virtualization.
● Transparent access to the unified fabric is provided by one of three types of network adapters in a mezzanine card form factor optimized for different purposes: a virtual interface card that incorporates Cisco VN-Link technology and up to 128 virtual interface devices configured dynamically, converged network adapters (CNAs) that provide a fixed number of Ethernet and fibre channel over Ethernet (FCoE) connections and are compatible with existing Fibre Channel driver stacks, and a network interface designed to deliver efficient, high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet.
● Cisco Extended Memory Technology in the Cisco UCS B250 M1 Extended Memory Blade Server expands the memory footprint available to two-socket x86 servers. The extended memory blade server can support up to 384 GB of DDR3 memory with up to 48 industry-standard DIMMs.
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