Today Cisco has announced the general availability of an all new Unified Computing System Fabric Interconnect, the 6324.

What’s so cool about this new Fabric Interconnect and why should you care?

In a nutshell the new 6324 FI is a converged Fabric Interconnect and IOM in one unit that plugs directly into the UCS 5108 Chassis. This is squarely aimed at the SMB market for environments that will never need to grow beyond 8 blades and/or four C-series servers.

To quote Cisco: “The Cisco UCS 6324 Fabric Interconnect extends the Cisco UCS architecture into environments with requirements for smaller domains. Providing the same unified server and networking capabilities as in the full-scale Cisco UCS solution, the Cisco UCS 6324 embeds the connectivity within the Cisco UCS 5108 Blade Server Chassis to provide a smaller domain of up to 12 servers (8 blade servers and up to 4 direct-connect rack servers).”

“The Cisco UCS 6324 is built to consolidate LAN and storage traffic onto a single unified fabric, eliminating the capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx) associated with multiple parallel networks, different types of adapter cards, switching infrastructure, and cabling within racks. The unified ports allow the fabric interconnect to support direct connections from Cisco UCS to Fibre Channel, FCoE, and Small Computer System Interface over IP (iSCSI) storage devices.”

Pricing looks really good on these as well, and should knock a significant chunk of change off a B-Series sale for the SMB market. Really looking forward to getting the word out on these! Going to be a huge hit in the market in my opinion!

Let’s take a look at the new Fabric Interconnect:

As you can see it has four standard SFP+ ports that can be used for network or FC uplinks or for direct attached storage (FC/FCoE/ISCSI/NFS all supported). There is also one QSFP port that supports direct attached C-Series servers or direct attached storage.

Here is how Cisco envisions a design with the 6324 FI: