"Our problem now is that the product teams think we can turn over servers really fast now," Senecal said, adding that UCS is increasing server performance eightfold.

UCS' momentum recently allowed Cisco to become the , and second in the U.S. in the first quarter. To keep that momentum going, Cisco this week rolled out the networking extensions for UCS.

First is the Fabric Interconnect 6248UP. This supports Cisco's Unified Port capability, which allows IT managers to designate any port to be Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel (2/4/8 gigabits per second) or Fibre Channel over Ethernet. It doubles the UCS system switching capacity to 1Tbps and 48 Unified Ports, and results in a 40% reduction in end-to-end latency, Cisco says.

Next is the Fabric Extender 2208XP Chassis IO Module, which doubles bandwidth to the blade chassis to 160Gbps.

Third, Cisco unveiled a Virtual Interface Card -- the VIC 1280 -- that quadruples bandwidth to the server through dual 40G interfaces, up from dual 10G on previous VICs. VIC 1280 also supports 256 virtual interfaces, double the number of previous-generation VIC interfaces.