The Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects are a core part of the Cisco Unified Computing System providing both network connectivity and management capabilities for the system (Figure 2). The Cisco UCS 6400 Series offer line-rate low-latency lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Fibre Channel functions.

The Cisco UCS 6400 Series provide the management and communication backbone for the Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers UCS 5108 B-Series Server Chassis UCS Managed C-Series Rack Servers and UCS S-Series Storage Servers. All servers attached to a Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnect become part of a single highly available management domain. In addition by supporting a unified fabric Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnect provides both the LAN and SAN connectivity for all servers within its domain.

From a networking perspective the Cisco UCS 6400 Series use a cut-through architecture supporting deterministic low-latency line-rate 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet ports switching capacity of 3.82 Tbps for the 6454 7.42 Tbps for the 64108 and 200 Gbps bandwidth between the Fabric Interconnect 6400 series and the IOM 2408 per 5108 blade chassis independent of packet size and enabled services. The product family supports Cisco low-latency lossless 10/25/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet unified network fabric capabilities which increase the reliability efficiency and scalability of Ethernet networks. The fabric interconnect supports multiple traffic classes over a lossless Ethernet fabric from the server through the fabric interconnect. Significant TCO savings come from an FCoE-optimized server design in which Network Interface Cards (NICs) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) cables and switches can be consolidated.