X marks the spot – Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology

I’ve always considered the letter x the most versatile and flexible letter in Latin alphabet. It is used in math (solve for X), scientific terms (X-ray, X-wave, X-band), on treasure maps, and funkily in all sorts of words (xpert, xprize).

What is Cisco UCS X Fabric Technology?

Cisco UCS X Fabric Technology is the name for the second fabric in X-Series. It is named for its versatility and flexibility. While Unified Fabric is Ethernet based, UCS X-Fabric will be more than one thing. It is the key technology that allows us to blur the lines between rack and blade servers. It will allow for real disaggregation enabling you to create pools of resources to best serve workloads. You will compose systems with policies in Cisco Intersight. With hybrid cloud services such as Intersight Workload Optimizer, Intersight Cloud Orchestrator, and AppDynamics, your applications can now demand and control their own resources. But Intersight is next week’s topic.

When we announced X-Series, both PCIe and CXL were mentioned but we aren’t limited to those just like the usage of x isn’t limited. While a blog isn’t the place to discuss roadmaps, I can tell you the first product will allow you to add PCIe based GPUs normally found in rack servers (our C-Series) to the UCS X210c M6 Compute Nodes. But we won’t stop there. Technology changes rapidly and a modular system must be able to adapt and take advantage of them to protect your investment and deliver new features and performance.

How does it work?

As outlined in the UCS X-Series Solution Overview, we will be using the PCIe pass through capabilities of our VICs or a UCS X-Fabric specific adapter to tie together the compute nodes and the GPUs for these first products. Once they are released, expect more technical white papers to be available.

What’s next

Come back next week as we discuss Cisco Intersight and X-Series. Can’t wait until then, check out the links in the blog for more information on UCS X-Series.