Cisco UCS Blade Chassis & Fabric Extender

UCS Blade Chassis

Cisco UCS Blade Chassis comes in Model 5108 Chassis, that incorporates unified fabric, integrated & embedded management, with fabric Extender technology.

Cisco 5108 is 6-RU blade server is the first blade server chassis and can be mount on any industry standard 19 inch (48cm) rack and uses standard front-to-back cooling.

It can host:

• A Maximum of eight half-width blade servers
• A maximum of four full-width servers.
• Any combination of half and full blade servers are also possible

5108 Chassis Front

From front, it provides access to manage the blade insertion and removal.

• Eight half-blade empty slots for maximum 8 half-width blade servers with removable divider in the middle, which can be removed for installing full-width blades.
• A maximum of four full-width servers.
• Four Slots for single power supplies and can be configured as non-redundant, N+1 redundant, and grid redundant.

5108 Chassis Back

From Back, it provides access to manage IOM modules, fans, and power supplies.

• Two slots for IOM module – acts as remote line cards to fabric interconnects
• Eight hot-pluggable fans for cooling
• Four power supply connectors.

Power Management & Redundancy Modes:

Non-redundant: Cisco UCS Manager turns on the minimum number of power supplies needed and balances the load between them. If any additional PSUs are installed, Cisco UCS Manager sets them to a“turned-off” state. If the power to any PSU is disrupted, the system may experience an interruption in service until Cisco UCS Manager can activate a new PSU and rebalance the load.

N+1: The total number of PSUs to satisfy non-redundancy, plus one additional PSU for redundancy, are turned on and equally share the power load for the chassis. If any additional PSUs are installed, Cisco UCS Manager sets them to a “turned-off” state. If the power to any PSU is disrupted, Cisco UCS Manager can recover without an interruption in service.

Grid: Two power sources are turned on, or the chassis requires greater than N+1 redundancy. If one source fails (which causes a loss of power to one or two PSUs), the surviving PSUs on the other power circuit continue to provide power to the chassis.

Fabric Extender (IOMs Module)

Fabric Extender are also called as IOMs (IOM Modules), acts as line cards to fabric Interconnect. IOM provides interface connection to blade servers, it multiplex data from blade servers and provide this data to fabric interconnects and vice versa.