Cisco Unified Computing System

Unified Computing System

CISCO have chosen the right market where they can demonstrate the network capabilities and implement the innovative thinking. CISCO got the knowledge of X86 hardware when the all the X86 hardware vendors were seeking solution for the blade architecture.

The idea behind the system is to reduce total cost of ownership & improve scalability by integrating the different components into a cohesive platform that can be managed as a single unit.

How different Cisco UCS X86 servers from other hardware vendors like HP and Dell X86 servers ?

• UCS blades comes along with fabric interconnects which runs on NX-OS with UCS Manager application. This application helps to manage the whole UCS environment as a single unit.
• Unlike other hardware vendors , Cisco will never ask you to upgrade the firmware on the systems periodically. Unless you would like to add new functionality or Operating systems requires new functionality, you can stay with older version of firmware.
• Stateless Computing – Which means that none of the UCS blades are encoded with MAC address ,WWN values, IP addresses, UUID, firmware and even server BIOS . These all the items are configured in UCS manager as a service profile and it will be applied to the server whenever required.  Here you can find more information about it.
• Single UCS manager manages 160 servers with the help of Cisco Fabric Extender Technology (FEX Technology).
• Cisco also offers UCS central which extends the management across multiple domains of UCS and supports 10,000 UCS servers.

 

Componenets of UCS :

• UCS Manager
• UCS Fabric interconnect
• UCS Blade Server Chassis 
• UCS B Series Blade servers
• UCS Virtual Interface cards
• UCS Fabric Extenders
• UCS C-Series Rack Mount Servers  

 

UCS – Manager:

The UCS Manager is the logic embedded in the Fabric Interconnects which provides management of the entire UCS system.
It offers unified embedded management interface that integrates server, network & storage access.
The UCS Manager is the management logic & interface that is used to manage & configure all aspects of the Unified Computing System hardware.
UCS Manager offers either a web browser launched graphical user interface, command line interface via Telnet or SSH or a native XML API.
 
Cisco UCS servers can be classified in to two types.

1. Cisco C – Series
2. Cisco B – Series

1. Cisco C – Series.

Cisco C – Series servers are nothing but a rack mountable servers. It has dedicated components unlike the blade servers. UCS manager(Fabric Interconnect) is not comes along with Cisco C-series servers but these servers can be added to it. If you do not have UCS manager , then you have to manage the each rack server using the Cisco Integrated Management central  (CIMC) which is similar to ILOM in sun hardware, DRAC in dell servers and ILO in  HP servers .

UCS C- series Rack Server

2. Cisco B – Series.

Cisco B – series servers are blade servers which comes along with UCS chassis and UCS manager (Fabric Interconnect).  Cisco blades are clearly has advantage over the C- series servers  on the cost and power consumption. UCS manager can be used to manage up to 160 B-series blade servers or C- series with the help of Fabric Extenders. UCS manager is a application which runs on NX-OS operating system(Linux based) and the hardware is based on Cisco Nexus 5000 switch.

CISCO UCS – B – Series

 

 

UCS Fabric Interconnect:


 

The Fabric Interconnect or FI is the UCS environment’s egress point.
The Fabric Interconnects provides a consolidated point of connection between the compute nodes & the traditional data center Ethernet & Fiber Channel fabrics. It provides a Unified Fabric connection to the blades themselves using a combination of Fiber Channel over Ethernet & to the traditional Ethernet standards.

 

UCS Blade Server Chassis & UCS B Series Blade servers:

The Blade Server Chassis & B series server blade servers form the compute component of the UCS.
B series Blade servers supports either full or half slot blade servers.
These are dual socket servers using the latest industry standard Intel x64 architecture.

Inside each blade server are either 1 or 2 mezzanine adapters which utilize the 2 10GE-capable ports to communicate with dedicated internal ports on each of the redundant pair of Fabric Extender I/O Modules in each blade chassis.

UCS Chassis - 5108

The UCS B-Series 5108 Blade Chassis provides 8 slots for server blades.
–    Up to 8 half width blades
–    Up to 4 full width blades

  

   

There are three different types of mezzanine card available.

•    Basic Ethernet NIC,
•    Converged Network Adapter
•    Cisco Virtual Interface Card.

 

 

Fabric extenders:

  The connection between the blade servers & the Fabric Interconnects are provided the by the Fabric Extender functionality of the I/O Modules which are installed in the rear of each blade chassis.
The I/O Modules also provide the logic for the UCS Manager to manage the blade chassis components & communicate with the integrated Baseboard Management Controller in each blade server.
The 2204 or 2208 are models of the Fabric Extender I/O Modules (IOMs)

Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) is a groundbreaking approach to computing. It is designed for IT innovation and business acceleration. The product portfolio includes blade and rack servers, edge scale computing, converged infrastructure, composable infrastructure, and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions.