FI Architecture & Data Sheet

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect Overview

Cisco UCS FI are now in fourth generation, Cisco FI 6100 was first generation, and are now no longer supported and sold. Second generation Cisco UCS FI are UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects.

The core functionality is same for all generation with different number of physical ports and can be upgraded to the latest UCSM software.

Cisco FI is a core part of UCS. Which provides following capabilities:

• Provides management and Communication backbone via UCSM software.
• Provides LAN and SAN connectivity to all servers within domain.
• Provides unified ports with support of Ethernet, FC, FCOE traffic.

In Production, FI are deployed in clustered pairs to provide high availability and they must be identical. The only scenario for having different FI in a cluster is during a cluster upgrade.

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect Generations:

Cisco UCS FI now comes under two generations:

Gen 2 Fabric Interconnect comes with two model:

• UCS FI 6248UP: 32 fixed ports and 16 port with an expansion module.
• UCS FI 6296UP: 48 Fixed port with 48 Port with three expansion module. (16 Ports per Module).

Generation 3 Fabric Connect comes with two modules:

• UCS FI 6332: 32 Port 40Gig Ethernet/FCOE
• UCS FI 6332-16UP: 16 Unified Port to support 1/10 Gig Ethernet/FCOE or 4/8/16 Gig native FC

Second Generation 6200 Fabric Interconnect:

• Offer line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10-Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE, and Fibre Channel functions. Cisco UCS 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects pro-vide LAN and SAN connectivity for all blades within their domain.
• Cisco UCS 6200 Series uses a cut-through networking architecture, supporting deterministic, low-latency, line-rate 10-Gigabit Ethernet on all ports,
• Switching capacity of 2 terabits (Tb), and a bandwidth of 320-Gbps per chassis, independent of packet size and enabled services.

UCS Second Generation 6248UP:

• 1 U Device with maximum of 48 converged ports.
• Port Speed 1/10 Gig, 10 Gig FCOE and 2/4/8 Gig FC.
• A max 20 blade server chassis per UCS domain
• Fabric throughput of 960 Gbps
• 32 Port on base unit with one expansion slot having 16 extra port.

UCS Second Generation 6296UP:

• 2 U Device with maximum of 96 converged ports.
• Port Speed 1/10 Gig, 10 Gig FCOE and 2/4/8 Gig FC.
• A max 20 blade server chassis per UCS domain
• Fabric throughput of 120 Gbps
• 48 Port on base unit with three expansion slot having 48 extra port.

Third Generation 6300 Fabric Interconnect:

• 6300 Fabric Interconnect extends the Cisco UCS architecture into environments with requirements for smaller domains.
• Provides the same unified server and networking capabilities as in the full-scale Cisco UCS solution
• It provides the same full-featured Cisco UCS management capabilities and XML application programming inter-face (API) as the full-scale Cisco UCS solution, in addition to integrating with Cisco UCS Central Software and Cisco UCS Director.

UCS Third generation 6332

• 1 U Device with maximum of 32 fixed ports.
• A max 20 blade server chassis per UCS domain
• Fabric throughput of 2.56 Tbps
• 32 ports 10.40 Gig Ethernet/FCOE connectivity and do not support FC Connectivity.
• 40 Gig port providing maximum of 98x10 Gig ports with breakout cables.
• Default 8 port license

UCS Third generation 6332-16 UP

• 1 U Device with maximum of 40 converged ports.
• A max 20 blade server chassis per UCS domain
• Fabric throughput of 2.46 Tbps
• 24 port on base unit (40 Gig Ethernet/FCOE)) with one expansion slot providing 16 extra ports (1/10 Gig Ethernet /FCOE or 1/4/6/8/16 Gig Fiber Channel)
• 40 Gig port providing maximum of 72x10 Gig ports with breakout cables.
• Default 12 port license (4 from fixed port and eight from expansion module)

Fourth Generation 6400 Fabric Interconnect

The Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects provide the management and communication backbone for Cisco UCS B-series blade servers, Cisco UCS5108 B-series server chassis, Cisco UCS Managed C-series rack-mount servers, and Cisco UCS S-series storage servers.