Fast and Flexible – New Third Generation Fabric Interconnect

Guest Blogger: Nikul Sheth, Product Manager for Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect

One of the things I admire about great athletes is they are both fast and flexible. This combination makes them more agile and gives them a competitive edge. Our next evolution of Cisco UCS Fabric provides customers with greater speed and flexibility to help you maintain your competitive edge. This third generation Fabric Interconnect enables a high-performance, low latency and lossless fabric architecture to address the requirements for deploying high capacity datacenters.

The new Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect leverages our key technology differentiators – UCS Fabric, the Virtual Interface Card (VIC) and UCS Manager. The Fabric Interconnect 6300 series and the MDS 24-Port 40G FCoE module enable a high-performance 40G FCoE end-to-end solution. The new 6300 series adds to our successful Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnect to deploy 40GbE, 40Gb FCoE, and 16Gb FC. This provides UCS customers with higher bandwidth and more configuration options, so they can have higher performance ports and the flexibility to support LAN and SAN connectivity for all servers within a domain.

Accelerating from a Unified Foundation

The Cisco UC S Fabric Interconnect provides the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis, and C-Series Rack Servers managed by Cisco UCS. All servers attached to the fabric interconnects become part of a single, highly available management domain. Cisco UCS management streamlines many of the most time-consuming operational activities, including configuration, provisioning, monitoring, and problem resolution. It unites computing, networking, storage access, and virtualization resources into a cohesive system designed to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility.

The 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect builds on this foundation, and it features two new 1RU 40GbE switches and a new 40GbE Fabric Extender. The 6300 series enables 40GbE ports that increases the throughput by 2.6X, and reduces latency by 3X compared to the 2nd Gen Fabric Interconnect.

The VIC 1300 series is based on 3rd generation Cisco ASIC technology, and it is ideally suited for next-generation networks requiring up to 40GbE bandwidth. It supports network overlay technologies, such as VXLAN, that enables overlay networks for virtual machines (VMs), allowing them to communicate or move between hosts within or between your data centers.  The 1300 series also carries forward support for advanced Cisco features such as VMFEX, Netflow, and usNIC. The VIC 1300 series is supported with the C220 M4, C240 M4 and the C3160 Servers.

The Cisco UCS Classic 5108 Modular Chassis connects to a pair of Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and VICs with UCS Manager, providing easy, fast scalability with industry-leading UCS management. UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis continues the successful platform that has proven itself over three generations of Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects and multiple generations of processors. As the IT market continues to evolve Cisco UCS products and solutions will enable customers to stay current without impacting data center performance and reliability.

Release Availability: The UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnect is now orderable.

If you plan to attend Cisco Live in Berlin, please stop by the data center booth to talk to our technical experts about UCS products and solutions.