LABS GALLERY: Cisco UCS (Unified Computing System) Hardware

The half-width blade shown from the front has slots for two local disks. Also seen to the left is the serial port for direct access to the unit. This test blade has two 10K SAS 146GB drives.

This is the full-length blade shown from the top with the cover removed. To the right you see the blue covers that protect the local disks. To the far left is the dual-port mezzanine card the provides up to 20G bps of I/O.

Here you can see the two Intel Xeon 5540 “Nehalem” processors. Each blade has a maximum capacity of 96GB of DDR3 RAM.

Mezzanine card options include either a Cisco Virtual Interface Card, a converged network adapter that is either Emulex- or QLogic-compatible, or a single 10GB Ethernet Adapter. Network, storage and management traffic all flow over connections provided by this card.

The connector grid at the far lower-left provides connectivity and also signals the chassis (shown later) that the blade is present.

Here is a UCS 5100 Series Blade Server chassis prior to being populated with Cisco UCS B200-M1 blade servers. Sitting on top are two Cisco UCS 6100 series fabric interconnects.

Although there are slots for eight blades, this test chassis had only five. Along the bottom you see the hot-swappable power supplies.

The 6U UCS 5108 blade chassis has plenty of fan cooling power. Notice two vertically mounted fabric extender modules. These fabric extenders have four 10GB connection ports. You can see that this unit is sandwiched between four Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects—two on top and two on the bottom.

The fabric extenders help minimize blade-to-chassis cabling, and also provide chassis environmental monitoring including temperature and power consumption.

The UCS 6100 series Fabric Interconnect connects up to 320 servers with line-rate, lossless 10 Gigabit Enternet and Fibre Channel over Enternet functionality. The 6120XP is a 1U device and can support as many as 160 blade servers and up to 20 chassis in a single management domain.

Here you see the fans and power supplies that are hot-swappable and designed to support straight cooling.