I'm a bit lost when I take a look to Nexus 5000 and UCS 6100. The description of Nexus 5000 is quite clear and I see what it does but the description of the UCS 6100 is a bit unclear for me. Could someone told me what would be the difference between a Nexus 5000 with all port at 10G and an UCS 6100 with all port at 10G ?
Thanks,
The UCS6100 is a component of the UCS architecture and while it provides network fabrics connectivity for discrete devices (your servers, other network gear, etc) its reason for existing is to provide unified (10G, DCB, FCoE) network fabric functionality and management for the Cisco UCS Blade chassis. I'm not familiar with either so I'm sure there are many specific feature differences given the huge array of configurations and features these devices provide - one that I'm aware of at the moment is that the UCS 6100 does not currently support Fiber Channel Switching completely (it supports NPIV only at the moment) for external connectivity (Northbound in UCS terms) - while the Nexus 5000 does (as explained in this blog post by Scott Lowe from EMC). In simple terms this means you cannot use a UCS 6100 as the sole Switch for a Fiber Channel Fabric. At the moment at least, that particular issue could change but the fundamental difference between a UCS part and a Nexus part won't, the former is a component for a unified platform and the latter is [or can be] a stand alone device.
