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INTRODUCTION TO CISCO UCS (UNIFIED COMPUTING SYSTEM)

Cisco UCS
Cisco UCS C-Series and B-Series
F. Mohaideen Abdul Kader
Lessons Learnt

CISCO UCS (UNIFIED COMPUTING SYSTEM) PART-1

Everybody would have been surprised when CISCO jumped in to the X86 server hardware market in 2009.
Since then they are growing rapidly in the server market and now they are one of the competitive vendors
for Dell and HP. 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.
Cisco named their X86 hardware as Unified Computing system(UCS). Ciscos main target is to reduce the
total ownership cost and improve scalability on the X86 hardware platforms.

How different Cisco UCS X86 servers from other hardware vendors like HP and Dell X86 servers ?
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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 . They are are configured in UCS
manager as a service profile and it will be applied to the server whenever required.
4. Single UCS manager manages 160 servers with the help of Cisco Fabric Extender Technology (FEX
Technology).
5. Cisco also offers UCS central which extends the management across multiple domains of UCS and
supports 10,000 UCS servers.

UCS Manager:

Cisco UCS servers can be classified in to two types.

Cisco C Series
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 .

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.