UCS 2.0 Features and Hardware
Last week at Cisco Live Las Vegas, Cisco annouced the eagerly awaited UCS 2.0 (coded Capitola) for Q3 this year.
As well as a few expected software feature additions the big buzz is around the added Hardware thats is being release along side.
A New Fabric Interconnect: 6248UP
1U 48 Unified Ports (i.e. can run Ethernet or Fibre Channel depending on SFP inserted)
A New Fabric Extender: 2208XP
8 x 10Gb uplinks to Fabric Interconnect, 32 10Gb downlinks to servers.
A new Virtual Interface Card: 1280 Virtual Interface Card (VIC)
8 x 10 Gb traces to the mid-plane (4 x 10Gb Fabric A and 4 x 10Gb Fabric B)
It should be stressed that Cisco are saying no current UCS products are being “End of Lifed” the new hardware is an addition to the existing portfolio.
I am yet to see the prices of the new hardware as if they are comparable of course you are just going to buy the new product.
Looking forward to getting my hands on some in the lab, and putting them through the paces.
For a much more comprehensive write up on UCS 2.0 refer to the below blog by Sean McGee of Cisco
http://www.mseanmcgee.com/2011/07/ucs-2-0-cisco-stacks-the-deck-in-las-vegas/
UCSguru.com 
So will this be where we see full on switchable converged fabric?
As you may know in the Fibre Channel world we have N ports (Hosts / Nodes) and F ports (Fabric switch ports) when you need to connect two switches together to Expand your fabric you configure the ports as E ports.
Currently in the FCoE world we have Virtual N ports, Virtual F ports but what we don’t have yet is Virtual E ports, thus FCoE cannot be “switched” across multiple switches. (There are ways to just forward the FCoE traffic and extend the distance between an vN port and vF port but that’s not true multi hop.
Multihop FCoE is just a code upgrade to get the vE functionality, due in the 5.2 (Delhi ) Nexus code due imminently and as mentioned the Nexus 5k features filter down to the UCS FI’s after approx 6 months.