Overview
The first product in the Cisco UCS 2100 Series is the Cisco UCS 2104XP Fabric Extender. It has four 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, Small Form-Factor Pluggable Plus (SFP+) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2104XP has eight 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 80 Gbps of I/O to the chassis.
  • Reduces TCO by removing management modules from the chassis, making the chassis stateless
  • Provides a single, highly available management domain for all system chassis, reducing administrative tasks
  • Simplifies operation by automatically synchronizing firmware levels between the fabric extenders and the interconnects
  • Decreases TCO by reducing the number of network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), switches, and cables needed
  • Transparently encapsulates fiber channel packets into Ethernet
  • Increases availability with an active-active data plane
  • Reduces TCO by optimizing overall system capacity to match actual workload demands
  • Removes the need for chassis management modules
  • Provides a reliable, robust foundation for unifying LAN and SAN traffic on a single transport
  • Simplifies management of multiple traffic flows over a single network link
  • Supports different classes of service, enabling both lossless and classic Ethernet on the same fabric
  • Enables consistent and coherent quality-of-service (QoS) management throughout the system
  • Enables a consistent operational model between virtual and physical environments
  • Provides the same level of network visibility for virtualized and non-virtualized environments
  • Improves diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities in a virtual environment
  • Simplifies network and security policy enforcement when migrating virtual machines from one host to another
  • Increases flexibility with a range of interconnect solutions, including copper Twinax cable for short runs and fiber for long runs
  • Consumes less power per port than traditional solutions