The Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System begins with the Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis. With a midplane-free design, I/O connectivity for the X9508 chassis is accomplished with frontloading, vertically oriented compute nodes intersecting with horizontally oriented I/O connectivity modules in the rear of the chassis. A unified Ethernet fabric is supplied with the Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules.

The system is primed with Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules that provide a robust Ethernet fabric and is set to accommodate emerging protocols with the innovative Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology, ensuring easy upgrades with new modules as they become available.

The major feature of the chassis include:

• 7-Rack-Unit (7RU) chassis has 8x front-facing flexible slots. These can house a combination of compute nodes and a pool of future I/O resources that may include GPU accelerators, disk storage, and nonvolatile memory.

• 2x 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 features.

  • Up to 100 Gbps of unified fabric connectivity per compute node

  • 8x 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. We call this connectivity 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, 4x100mm, 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 Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, identified as UCSX-S9108-100G, enhances the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System by incorporating a pair of internal Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects S9108 100G. This integration creates a self-contained system that connects up to eight server nodes with unified fabric, IP, and Fibre Channel connectivity, all managed by Cisco UCS Manager. The X-Series Direct is compatible with all components of the X-Series Modular System.

This Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis supports Cisco UCS 6664, Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, Cisco UCS 6536, UCS 6454, UCS 64108 Fabric Interconnects.

For more information, see Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis Data Sheet.

Cisco UCS Manager Release 6.0(1b) introduces support for adding a secondary Cisco UCS X9508 chassis to an existing Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects 9108 100G (Cisco UCS X-Series Direct) configuration. This enhancement increases system scalability and flexibility, enabling easier expansion of your data center infrastructure to meet changing application demands.

Each Cisco UCS X9508 chassis supports up to 8 server nodes, allowing the following configurations and supporting a total of up to 20 servers within the same management domain:

• Up to 16 X-Series Compute Nodes when two chassis are connected (8 servers per chassis × 2 chassis).

• Up to four C-Series rack servers can also be connected.

• The chassis supports one or more of the following servers:

  • Up to eight two-socket Cisco UCS X215c M8 Compute Nodes

  • Up to eight two-socket Cisco UCS X210c M6/M7/M8 Compute Nodes

  • Up to four four-socket Cisco UCS X410c M7 Compute Nodes

  • Up to four Cisco UCS C220 M7/M8 Servers

  • Up to four Cisco UCS C240 M7/M8 Servers

  • Up to four Cisco UCS C225 M7/M8 Servers

  • Up to four Cisco UCS C245 M7/M8 Servers

To add a secondary chassis and C-Series rack servers, do the following:

• Connect the secondary Cisco UCS X9508 chassis to the existing X-Series Direct setup.

• Add and configure the supported Cisco UCS C-Series rack servers as part of the domain.

• Configure the server ports and wait for the secondary chassis and rack servers to be discovered.

Note	In Cisco UCS X-Series Direct configurations, actions such as recommission, decommission, and remove are available only for the secondary Cisco UCS X9508 chassis; these actions cannot be performed on the primary Cisco UCS X9508 chassis.

The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is logically part of the fabric interconnects, thus creating a single, coherent management domain and decreasing management complexity. In the management domain, server management is handled by the fabric interconnect, while I/O and network management is extended to every chassis and blade server. Basing the I/O infrastructure on a unified fabric allows the Cisco Unified Computing System to have a simple and streamlined chassis yet offer a comprehensive set of I/O options. This results in the chassis having only five basic components:

• The physical chassis with passive midplane and active environmental monitoring circuitry

• Four power-supply bays with power entry in the rear, and redundant-capable, hot-swappable power supply units accessible from the front panel

• Eight hot-swappable fan trays, each with two fans

• Two fabric extender slots accessible from the back panel

• Eight blade server slots accessible from the front panel

The blade server chassis has flexible partitioning with removable dividers to handle two blade server form factors:

• Half-width blade servers have access to power and two 10GBASE-KR connections, one to each fabric extender slot.

• Full-width blade servers connect to power and two connections to each fabric extender.