Summary

The Gartner Magic Quadrant report for blade servers, published in 2012, placed Cisco as a market leader along with Dell, HP, and IBM. Cisco has already surpassed Dell from its number three position. According to this report, Cisco's entry into the blade server market is causing re-evaluation among the installed blade server bases. Cisco's clustered FI-based design provides a complete solution for converged data connectivity, blade server provisioning, and management whereas other vendor offerings acquire the same functionality with increased complexity.

Cisco UCS presented a paradigm shift for blade servers and datacenter design and management to the industry. In this chapter, we learned about the UCS solution's integral components and physical installation of the UCS solution.

We learned about the various available options for all the UCS components including FIs, blade chassis, blade servers, rack-mount servers, and the internal parts of the servers.

In the next chapter, we will learn about Cisco UCS Emulator which is an excellent tool for exploring UCSM software.