Cisco has introduced native end-to-end 40 Gig support in the third-generation of UCS. With high-density 40 Gig ports in Fabric Interconnects and Fabric Extenders with 80 Gig Virtual Interface Cards. The following are the major changes:
- Cisco UCS 6300 Series Fabric Interconnects: These provide 40 Gig Ethernet/FCoE connectivity to upstream network switches and downstream to Cisco UCS B-Series servers and 4, 8, and 16 Gig native Fibre Channel connectivity to upstream storage switches with the 6332-16UP Fabric Interconnect Series
- Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extenders: These provide up to 160 Gig throughput to each Fabric Interconnect with 4x40 Gig uplink ports and 32x10 Gig backend ports to connect blade servers inside the chassis, totaling 320 Gig throughput to each chassis with two Fabric Extenders
- Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1300: This provides up to 80 Gig network throughput to a blade server with the correct combination of hardware
- Cisco Nexus 2348UPQ 10GE Fabric Extenders: These provide 6x40 Gig ports of upstream connectivity and downstream connectivity to C-Series rack servers
