Cisco Systems UCS-IOM-2204XP Cisco UCS 2200 series Fabric Extender brings the unified fabric into the blade server enclosure, providing multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections between blade servers and the fabric interconnect, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management.The Cisco UCS 2200 series is enabling a lossless and deterministic Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) fabric to connect all blades and chassis together. Since 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.The Cisco UCS 2204XP Fabric Extender has four 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE-capable, SFP+ ports that connect the blade chassis to the fabric interconnect. Each Cisco UCS 2204XP has sixteen 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports connected through the midplane to each half-width slot in the chassis. Typically configured in pairs for redundancy, two fabric extenders provide up to 80 Gbps of I/O to the chassis. Reduces TCO by removing management modules from the chassis, making the chassis statelessProvides a single, highly available management domain for all system chassis, reducing administrative tasksSimplifies operation by automatically synchronizing firmware levels between the fabric extenders and the interconnectsDecreases TCO by reducing the number of network interface cards (NICs), host bus adapters (HBAs), switches, and cables neededTransparently encapsulates Fiber Channel packets into EthernetIncreases availability with an active-active data planeReduces TCO by optimizing overall system capacity to match actual workload demandsRemoves the need for chassis management modulesProvides a reliable, robust foundation for unifying LAN and SAN traffic on a single transportHelps enable consistent and coherent quality-of-service (QoS) management throughout the systemHelps enable a consistent operational model between virtual and physical environmentsProvides the same level of network visibility for virtualized and nonvirtualized environmentsImproves diagnostic and troubleshooting capabilities in a virtual environmentSimplifies network and security policy enforcement when migrating virtual machines from one host to anotherIncreases flexibility with a range of interconnect solutions, including copper Twinax cable for short runs and fiber for long runsConsumes less power per port than traditional solutions