Summary
Unified Fabric offers several benefits to customers, including
- Lower capital expenditures: Through the reduction of adapters, cables, and ports required within the infrastructure.
- Lower operational expenses: Through the reduction of adapters, cables, and ports drawing power within the data center.
- Reduced deployment cycles: Provides a wire-once model, where all LAN, SAN, IPC, and management traffic is available to every server without requiring additional connectivity components.
- Higher availability: Few adapters and fewer ports means fewer components that could fail.
By taking advantage of enhancements to traditional Ethernet technologies, and the emergence of technologies such as FCoE, customers can realize these benefits with minimal disruption to operational models. This chapter showed the basic Nexus 5x00 and Nexus 7000 configurations necessary to provide a Unified access method for LAN data traffic and SAN storage traffic. The multiple technologies that can be used with Unified Fabric such as NPV, NPIV FCOE-NPV, Storage VDCs, and shared interfaces were illustrated, and various use cases were discussed.