Cisco UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnect

The Cisco 6536 Fabric Interconnects are a core part of the Cisco Unified Computing System, providing both network connectivity and management capabilities for the system. The Cisco 6536 offer line-rate, low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and Fibre Channel functions.

The Cisco UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnect provide the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS X-Series compute nodes, UCS X9508 X-series chassis, UCS B-Series Blade Servers, UCS 5108 B-Series Server Chassis and UCS C-Series Rack Servers. All servers attached to a Cisco UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnect become part of a single, highly available management domain. In addition, by supporting a unified fabric, Cisco UCS 6536 Fabric Interconnect provides both the LAN and SAN connectivity for all servers within its domain.

From a networking perspective, the Cisco UCS 6536 uses a cut-through architecture, supporting deterministic, low-latency, line-rate 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, a switching capacity of 7.42 Tbps per FI and 14.84 Tbps per unified fabric domain, independent of packet size and enabled services. It enables 1600Gbps bandwidth per X9508 chassis per domain with a X9108-IFM-100G in addition to enabling end-to-end 100G ethernet and 200G aggregate bandwidth per X210c compute node. With X9108-IFM-25G and IOM 2408, it enables 400Gbps bandwidth per chassis per FI domain. The product family supports Cisco low-latency, lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric capabilities, which increase the reliability, efficiency, and scalability of Ethernet networks. The fabric interconnect supports multiple traffic classes over a lossless Ethernet fabric from the server through the fabric interconnect. Significant TCO savings come from Cisco's unified fabric design in which Network Interface Cards (NICs), Host Bus Adapters (HBAs), cables, and switches can be consolidated.