Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System – Cisco Describing Cisco UCS Components

July 6, 2024

Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System

The Cisco UCS X-Series Modular system, shown in Figure 16-17, is the latest generation of the Cisco UCS. Here are the major new features:

  

Figure 16-17 Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System

  • The system operates in Intersight Managed Mode (IMM), as it is managed from the Cisco Intersight.
  • The new Cisco UCS X9508 chassis has a midplane-free design. The I/O connectivity for the X9508 chassis is accomplished via frontloading, with vertically oriented compute nodes intersecting with horizontally oriented I/O connectivity modules in the rear of the chassis.
  • Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric modules provide connectivity to the upstream Cisco UCS 6400 Fabric Interconnects.
  • Cisco UCS X210c M6 compute nodes – blade servers designed for the new chassis.

The new Cisco UCS X9508 chassis provides a new and adaptable substitute for the first generation of the UCS chassis. It is designed to be expandable in the future. As proof of this, the X-Fabric slots are intended for future use. It has optimized cooling flows to support reliable operation for longer times. The major features are as follows:

  • A seven-rack-unit (7RU) chassis has 8× front-facing flexible slots. These can house a combination of compute nodes and a pool of future I/O resources, which may include GPU accelerators, disk storage, and nonvolatile memory.
  • 2× Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules (IFMs) at the top of the chassis that connect the chassis to upstream Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects. Each IFM has the following features:
    • Up to 100Gbps of unified fabric connectivity per compute node.
    • 8× 25-Gbps SFP28 uplink ports. The unified fabric carries management traffic to the Cisco Intersight cloud-operations platform, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) traffic, and production Ethernet traffic to the fabric interconnects.
    • At the bottom are slots, ready to house future I/O modules that can flexibly connect the compute modules with I/O devices. This connectivity is called “Cisco UCS X-Fabric technology” because X is a variable that can evolve with new technology developments.
    • Six 2800W power supply units (PSUs) provide 54V power to the chassis with N, N+1, and N+N redundancy. A higher voltage allows efficient power delivery with less copper and reduced power loss.
  • Efficient, 4×100mm, dual counter-rotating fans deliver industry-leading airflow and power efficiency. Optimized thermal algorithms enable different cooling modes to best support the network environment. Cooling is modular so that future enhancements can potentially handle open- or closed-loop liquid cooling to support even higher-power processors.

The chassis supports up to eight Cisco UCS X210c M6 compute nodes. These are newly designed Cisco UCS blade servers, specifically for the Cisco UCS X9508 chassis. The main features are as follows:

  • CPU: Up to 2× third-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with up to 40 cores per processor and 1.5MB Level 3 cache per core.
  • Memory: Up to 32× 256GB DDR4-3200 DIMMs for up to 8TB of main memory. Configuring up to 16× 512GB Intel Optane persistent memory DIMMs can yield up to 12TB of memory.
  • Storage: Up to six hot-pluggable solid-state drives (SSDs) or Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) 2.5-inch drives with a choice of enterprise-class RAID (redundant array of independent disks) or passthrough controllers with four lanes each of PCIe Gen 4 connectivity and up to two M.2 SATA drives for flexible boot and local storage capabilities.
  • mLOM virtual interface card: The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 14425 can occupy the server’s modular LAN On Motherboard (mLOM) slot, enabling up to 50-Gbps of unified fabric connectivity to each of the chassis Intelligent Fabric Modules (IFMs) for 100-Gbps connectivity per server.
  • Optional mezzanine virtual interface card: Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 14825 can occupy the server’s mezzanine slot at the bottom of the chassis. This card’s I/O connectors link to Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology, which is planned for future I/O expansion. An included bridge card extends this VIC’s 2× 50Gbps of network connections through IFM connectors, bringing the total bandwidth to 100Gbps per fabric—for a total of 200Gbps per server.
  • Security: The server supports an optional Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Additional features include a secure boot FPGA and ACT2 anti-counterfeit provisions.