Cisco UCS X9508 Network Equipment Chassis

The Cisco UCS® X-Series Modular System begins with the Cisco UCS X9508 chassis, engineered to be adaptable and future ready. It is a standard, open system designed to deploy and automate faster in concert with your hybrid cloud environment.

With a midplane-free design, I/O connectivity for the X9508 chassis is accomplished with front-loading, vertically oriented compute nodes intersecting with horizontally oriented I/O connectivity modules in the rear of the chassis. A Unified Ethernet fabric is supplied with the Cisco UCS 9108 Intelligent Fabric Modules. Cisco UCS X-Fabric Technology interconnects enable connectivity between the compute and resource nodes using PCIe Gen4 and will supply other industry-standard protocols as standards emerge. Interconnections can be easily updated with new modules.

The 7 rack-unit (7RU) Cisco UCS X9508 chassis has 8 flexible slots that can house a combination of compute nodes and a pool of current and future I/O resources that may include GPU accelerators, disk storage, and nonvolatile memory.

At the top rear of the chassis are two intelligent fabric modules that connect the chassis to upstream Cisco UCS 6400 Series and 6536 Fabric Interconnects. At the bottom are slots housing XFM modules that can flexibly connect the compute modules with I/O devices and ready for future modules. This Cisco UCS X-Fabric technology uses 'X' to denote a variable that can evolve with new technology developments.

Six 2800 W power supply units (PSUs) provide 54 VDC power to the chassis with N, N+1, N+2, and N+N redundancy. The higher voltage allows efficient power delivery with less copper and reduced power loss. Efficient, 100 mm, dual counter-rotating fans deliver industry-leading airflow and power efficiency. Optimized thermal algorithms enable different cooling modes to best support your environment. Cooling is modular so that future enhancements can potentially handle open- or closed-loop liquid cooling to support even higher-power processors.

In addition to the Cisco UCS® X-Series Modular System there is the Cisco UCS® X-Series Direct. Cisco UCS X-Series Direct transforms the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System into a self-contained system with pair of internal Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects 9108 100G that integrate each of up to eight server nodes with Cisco unified fabric connectivity, upstream IP and Fibre Channel connectivity, all managed through Cisco Intersight or the time-proven Cisco UCS Manager.

The main benefits of the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System and the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct are as follows:

• Cloud-operated infrastructure: Management is moved from the on-premise network to the cloud so that you can respond at the speed and scale of your business and manage all of your infrastructure. You can shape Cisco UCS X Series Modular System resources to workload requirements with the Cisco Intersight cloudoperations platform.
• An adaptable system designed for modern applications: Because requirements change often, you need a system that does not lock you into one set of resources when you find that you need another. For hybrid applications, and a range of traditional data center applications, with the Cisco UCS X Series Modular System, you can consolidate onto a single platform that combines the density and efficiency of blade servers with the expandability of rack servers. The result is better performance, automation, and efficiency.