Cisco is the leader in integrated infrastructure, and over 50% of all integrated infrastructure deployments run on Cisco UCS servers and Nexus switches. The Gartner Magic Quadrant for integrated servers report published for the year 2015 placed Cisco as a market leader along with VCE, Oracle, and HP. Cisco's clustered Fabric Interconnect-based design provides a complete solution for converged data connectivity, blade server provisioning, and management whereas other vendors' offerings acquire the same functionality with added complexity.

Cisco UCS presented a paradigm shift for blade servers, data center design, and management to the industry. In this chapter, we acquired knowledge about the UCS solution's integral components and a broad portfolio of UCS servers to choose from various options based on application requirements.

We learned about the various available options for all UCS components, including Fabric Interconnects, blade chassis, blade servers, rack-mount servers, storage servers, modular servers, and UCS Mini.

In the next chapter, we will discuss installing UCS hardware components, including Fabric Interconnects, Fabric Extenders, chassis, blade servers, and rack servers. We'll also discuss the Cisco SingleConnect technology to connect blade and rack servers.