What is the Cisco UCS Manager?

The Cisco UCS is truly a “unified” architecture that integrates three major datacenter technologies into a single, coherent system:

1. Computing
2. Network
3. Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers.

The Cisco UCS is made up of the following major components:

1. Cisco 6100-series Fabric Interconnects
2. Cisco UCS 5100-series Blade Server Enclosures
3. Cisco 2100-series Fabric Extenders
4. Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers
5. Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-mounted Servers
6. Cisco UCS Converged Network Adapters (CNA)
7. Cisco UCS Manager

Gone are the days of disparate (siloed) systems all across the datacenter with their many different management tools and networking infrastructure. Here to stay is a unified architecture that offers these key features:

Hardware State Abstraction

With Cisco UCS, we can use “service profiles” that represent the physical characteristics of a server that make it unique from other servers (MAC address, WWN, UUID, BIOS, boot order, etc.).

Unified Fabric that Provides “Lossless” Connectivity

Within the UCS architecture, a single cable is used for all signaling transmissions, regardless of whether it’s data or storage.

Virtualized Adapters

Virtualization is a key enabling technology within the Cisco UCS architecture, and the network adapters within the individual servers are no exception.

Expanded Memory

One of the key performance enhancements in Cisco UCS is the ability to virtualize the physical memory installed in the server DIMM slots. This virtualization allows us to increase the effective capability of the physical memory to four times the original capacity.

Unified Management

The Cisco UCS Manager (UCSM) allows for many blade servers and their related networking and storage con­nectivity, regardless of whether it’s Ethernet or Fiber Channel, to be managed within a single and very intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Cisco Unified Communications Primer

Modern business communication capabilities evolved tremendously from the days of analog and digital telephony. Back then, we relied on Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs) located physically at each site to control the analog and digital signaling for local phones and other devices, such as fax machines and overhead paging solutions.

Related Courses
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS
CAPPSv8.0 – Integrating Cisco Unified Communications Applications

Excerpted from GlobalKnowledge.com