Fast & Flexible – New 4th Gen Fabric Interconnect and VIC

Today, guest blogger Nikul Sheth, Sr. Product Manager for Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect writes about our new 4th gen fabric.

Accelerating from a Unified Foundation

Our next evolution of Cisco UCS Fabric provides customers with greater speed and flexibility to help you maintain your competitive edge. This fourth 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 6454 Fabric Interconnect leverages our key technology differentiators – UCS Fabric, the Virtual Interface Card (VIC) and UCS Manager. The new Fabric Interconnect 6454 series adds to our successful Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects and UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects to deploy 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet and FCoE, and support for 32 Gigabit Fibre Channel. 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.

Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect

The Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect provides the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers, 5108 Blade Server Chassis, C-Series Rack Servers, and S-Series Storage servers that are managed by Cisco UCS Manager. 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 6454 Fabric Interconnect builds on this foundation, and it features a new 1RU 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet Fabric. The 6454 enables 10/25 Gigabit Ethernet port for server connectivity that increases the throughput more than 3.4X compared to FI 6248 and reduces latency by 2X compared to the 2nd Gen Fabric Interconnect.

The UCS Fabric Interconnect 6454 is supported by Cisco Intersight: Cisco’s systems management platform that delivers intuitive computing through cloud-powered intelligence. This platform offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools. The advantages of the model-based management of the Cisco UCS platform plus Cisco Intersight are extended to Cisco UCS servers.

Cisco UCS 1400 Series VICs

The new VIC 1400 series is based on 4th generation Cisco ASIC technology, and it is ideally suited for next-generation networks requiring 10/25 Gigabit Ethernet for C-Series and S-Series servers and 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity for B-Series servers. A hardware classification engine provides support for advanced data center requirements including stateless network offloads for VXLAN, and NVGRE. Additional features support low latency kernel bypass for performance optimization such as usNIC, RDMA/RoCEv2, DPDK, Netqueue, and VMQ/VMMQ. The Cisco UCS VIC 1400 series provides high network performance and low latency for the most demanding applications. The VIC 1400 series are supported with the B200 M5, B480 M5, C220 M5, C240 M5, C480 M5, C4200 with C125 M5, and S3260 Servers.

Cisco UCS VIC 1440 mLOM Adapter

Cisco UCS VIC 1480 Mezz Adapter

Cisco UCS VIC 1455 PCIe Adapter

Cisco UCS VIC 1457 mLOM Adapter

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 four 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 6454 Fabric Interconnect and UCS VIC 1455/1457 are now orderable now. The VIC 1440/1480 will be orderable soon.

If you want to learn more about our new fabric interconnect or VICs, contact your Cisco sales team or Cisco partner to discuss your fabric needs and how the 4th gen FI and VICs can meet your needs.