The data center computer industry has seen dramatic changes with the inception of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS). Within a few years, Cisco UCS has become the industry standard for converged compute infrastructures and is dominating the server market in the world. Unlike competitors who glued legacy rack server solutions into a chassis form factor, Cisco UCS is a truly unified platform that combines compute, network, and storage access in a single system. The current rate of increasing data and application traffic has made the network industry scale toward 40 Gig switches, whereas the server industry is way behind on this. To match with the network industry, Cisco brought out the third-generation hardware of UCS and breathed new life into it with 40 Gig Ethernet support. The Cisco third-generation UCS 6300 Fabric Interconnect series, and UCS 2300 Fabric Extender (I/O module) 2304 series integrated with B-Series and C-Series, enables an end-to-end 40 Gig Ethernet and FCoE solution, and extended 16 Gig native Fibre Channel support for high speed and performance.
In this chapter, we will acquaint ourselves with Cisco UCS products and the innovative UCS architecture, which abstracts underlying physical hardware and provides unified management to all devices. The chapter can help you understand various UCS products and new changes in the third-generation of UCS.
We'll explore the following topics:
- UCS architecture overview
- Fabric Interconnects
- Fabric Extenders
- Blade server chassis
- B-Series blade servers
- C-Series rack servers
- Mezzanine adapters
- Cisco storage servers
- Cisco UCS Mini