The Cisco UCS 5100 Series Blade Server Chassis is a crucial building block of the Cisco Unified Computing System, delivering a scalable and flexible blade server chassis for today's and tomorrow's data center while helping reduce TCO.
The Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis (Figure 2) is six rack units (6RU) high and can mount in an industry-standard 19-inch rack. A chassis can house up to eight half-width Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers and can accommodate both half-width and full-width blade form factors.
Four hot-swappable power supplies are accessible from the front of the chassis, and single-phase AC, -48V DC, and 200 to 380V DC power supplies and chassis are available. These power supplies are up to 94 percent efficient and meet the requirements for the 80 Plus Platinum rating. The power subsystem can be configured to support nonredundant, N+1 redundant, and grid-redundant configurations. The rear of the chassis contains eight hot-swappable fans, four power connectors (one per power supply), and two I/O bays that can support either Cisco UCS 2000 Series Fabric Extenders or the Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect. A passive midplane provides up to 80 Gbps of I/O bandwidth per server slot and up to 160 Gbps of I/O bandwidth for two slots. The chassis is capable of supporting future 40 Gigabit Ethernet standards.
- Provides 8 blades with 1.2 terabits (Tb) of available Ethernet throughput to meet future I/O requirements
- Supports up to 2 x 40 Gigabit Ethernet for every blade server slot when used in high-availability mode
- Provides investment protection for new fabric extenders, fabric interconnects, and future blade servers
- Requires no configuration; like all Cisco UCS components, chassis are automatically recognized and configured by Cisco UCS Manager
- Allows the simplicity and consistency of a Cisco UCS managed solution to be economically achieved for single-chassis implementations
- Enables bandwidth scaling based on application needs; blades can be configured from 1.25 Gbps to 40 Gbps or more
- Allows use of two fabric extenders for both redundancy and aggregation of bandwidth
- Eliminates switches from the chassis along with complex configuration and management of those switches, allowing a system to scale without adding complexity and cost
- Reduces TCO by reducing the number of network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), switches, and cables that need to be managed, cooled, and powered
- Reduces TCO by managing servers, networking, and storage from a single interface
