The Cisco UCS 9108 25G Intelligent Fabric Module (IFM) brings the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing connectivity between the blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management.
The Cisco UCS 9108 25G IFM connects the I/O fabric between the Cisco UCS 6454 Fabric Interconnect and Cisco UCS 64108 Fabric Interconnect and the Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis, enabling a lossless and deterministic converged fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Because the fabric extender is similar to a distributed line card, it does not perform any switching and is managed as an extension of the fabric interconnects. This approach removes switching from the chassis, reducing overall infrastructure complexity and enabling Cisco UCS to scale to many chassis without multiplying the number of switches needed, reducing TCO, and allowing all chassis to be managed as a single, highly available management domain.