The Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect provides the management, LAN, and storage connectivity for the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis and direct-connect rack-mount servers. It provides the same full-featured Cisco UCS management capabilities and XML API as the full-scale Cisco UCS solution in addition to integrating with Cisco UCS Central Software and Cisco UCS Director.
From a networking perspective, the Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect uses a cut-through architecture, supporting deterministic, low-latency, line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet on all ports, switching capacity of up to 500 Gbps, and 80-Gbps uplink bandwidth for each chassis, independent of packet size and enabled services. Sixteen 10-Gbps links connect to the servers, providing a 20-Gbps link from each Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect to each server. The product family supports Cisco low-latency, lossless 10 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 blade through the fabric interconnect. Significant TCO savings come from an Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE)-optimized server design in which network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), cables, and switches can be consolidated.
