The Cisco UCS 2408 Fabric Extender brings the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure providing connectivity between the blade servers and the fabric interconnect simplifying diagnostics cabling and management. It is a fourth-generation I/O Module (IOM) that shares the same form factor as the third-generation Cisco UCS 2304 Fabric Extender which is compatible with the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis.

The Cisco UCS 2408 connects the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect and Cisco UCS 64108 Fabric Interconnect and the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis enabling a lossless and deterministic converged fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Because the fabric extender is similar to a distributed line card it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis reducing overall infrastructure complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches needed reducing TCO and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single highly available management domain.

The Cisco UCS 2408 also manages the chassis environment (power supply fans and blades) in conjunction with the fabric interconnect. Therefore separate chassis-management modules are not required.

Cisco UCS 2408 Fabric Extender

The Cisco UCS 2408 Fabric Extender has eight 25-Gigabit Ethernet FCoE-capable Small Form-Factor Pluggable (SFP28) ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2408 provide 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis giving it a total 32 10G interfaces to UCS blades. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy two fabric extenders provide up to 400 Gbps of I/O from FI 6400 series to 5108 chassis.

Cisco SingleConnect Technology

Cisco^® SingleConnect Technology provides an easy intelligent and efficient way to connect and manage computing in the data center. SingleConnect unifies LAN SAN and systems management into one simplified link for rack servers blade servers and virtual machines.

SingleConnect is an end-to-end I/O architecture. It incorporates Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) Cisco UCS fabric interconnects and Cisco Fabric Extender Technology (FEX Technology) to connect every server on a single network fabric and on a single network layer. SingleConnect innovations dramatically simplify IT operations and reduce data center costs and are exclusive to Cisco UCS.

SingleConnect provides one connection for:

• Rack servers and blade servers
• LAN SAN and systems management
• Physical servers and virtual machines

Performance

• Hardware forwarding at 1.04 Tbps
• Low-latency design providing predictable consistent traffic latency regardless of packet size traffic pattern or enabled features

Layer 2

• Layer 2 VLAN trunks
• IEEE 802.1Q VLAN encapsulation
• Support for up to 1024 VLANs and Virtual SANs (VSANs)
• Jumbo frames on all ports (up to 9216 bytes)
• Pause frames (IEEE 802.3x)

QoS

• Layer 2 IEEE 802.1p (Class of Service [CoS])
• CoS-based egress queuing
• Egress strict-priority queuing
• Egress port-based scheduling: Weighted Round Robin (WRR)
• Sixteen hardware queues per port

High availability

• Up to two fabric extenders can work in the Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis
• Active/active data-plane operation with failover
• Capability to fail over from one fabric extender to another in the event of a failure
• Active/passive management-plane operation
• Support for nonstop management-plane functions; if the active fabric extender fails the passive fabric extender takes over the chassis management functions

Management

• Management of fabric extenders integrated into Cisco UCS Manager (please refer to the Cisco UCS Manager data sheet for more information about management interfaces)
• Capability to manage blade server chassis components such as power supplies fans and blades in conjunction with the fabric interconnect
• Firmware levels between the fabric extender and fabric interconnect always synchronized
• Low-latency lossless 25 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric
• PFC (per-priority pause frame support)
• Data Center Bridging Exchange (DCBX) Protocol
• IEEE 802.1Qaz: Bandwidth management

Industry standards

• IEEE 802.1p: CoS prioritization
• IEEE 802.1Q: VLAN tagging
• IEEE 802.3: Ethernet
• IEEE 802.3ad: Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP)
• IEEE 803.3by: 25 Gigabit Ethernet
• SFP28 support

Physical specifications

SFP28 optics

Cisco UCS products support 25 Gigabit Ethernet SFP28 copper Twinax cables for short distances and SFP28 optics for longer distances. The 25-Gigabit Ethernet cables and transceivers qualified listed in this data sheet are qualified to work with both Cisco UCS 6454 and Cisco UCS 64108 Fabric Interconnect and Cisco UCS 2408 Fabric Extender.

Environment

• Operating temperature: 32 to 104°F (0 to 40°C)
• Nonoperating temperature: -40 to 158°F (-40 to 70°C)
• Humidity: 5 to 95% (noncondensing)
• Altitude: 0 to 10000 ft (0 to 3000m)