UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect
If like me you do some quite large UCS designs, the 6296UP is a very welcome addition to the UCS product portfolio, often In designs consisting of 10 Chassis or more each requiring very high IO, I had to start to think about compromising the number of IO Module to Fabric Interconnect Links and having to use the slightly higher port count of the 6140 (with both expansion modules) over the 6248UP, those type of decisions should be gone when the 6296UP is shipping, as now I will be able to hit 20 Chassis (Maximum currently supported) using 4 IO module links. and still have 16 ports for SAN and LAN Uplinks. Can’t see any real immediate requirements to go to 8 x FI to IOM links with the 2208XP but I guess the option is there for real IO hungary workloads. Of course you have the option of a combination of setups depending on the workloads on a particular chassis, but my customers love the “just wire’em up to the MAX once and leave it” type setup and have the flexibilty of moving any workload anywhere without thinking about how much IO a particular chassis has available.

2204 IO Module
The new UCS Generation 2 2204 IO Module is (as its name would indicate) basically just a 2208 cut in half, i.e. 4 Network ports and 16 blade facing ports (2 x 10Gbs traces per server, per Fabric = 40Gbps per half width blade) this will be a good fit in situations which want a good performance/cost balance option, ustilising double the server traces of a 2104XP when used in conjuction with the VIC 1280.

All products should hopfully be shipping by March 2012