Board controller firmware is the one exception (as you can't downgrade it).  But your overall UCS-C or UCS-B packages need to fall within that cross-support matrix. You'll need to open a TAC case, if you are still having issues after getting the firmware within spec.   Kirk... ... View more

There are some 40 to 10Gb converters, CVR-QSFP-SFP10G QSFP to SFP+ adapter (QSA), or 'octopus' cables that go from 40Gb to 4x10Gb such as QSFP-4SFP10G-CU3M. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-s-series-storage-servers/s3260-specsheet.pdf You will want to check your upstream switch's sfp compatability list as well. The 3260 can have other PCI-E devices installed as well such as UCSC-PCIE-IRJ45 Intel i350T4 Quad Port 1 Gb copper, if you use one of the compute slots for the I/O expander module.   Kirk...   ... View more

Trying to make sure I understand your question fully.... The 3260 is chassis that provides up to 2 compute slots, with shared 40Gb networking, and up to 60 large form factor drive slots, plus OS boot SSD slots. You are going to need the same kind of infrastructure to connect to it as you would any other server, including L2/L3 switches. How are you expecting your end users to use it/connect to it?   Some super basic setup could involve throwing RedHat/CentOS on it, and creating some big NFS shares on it,, or configure iSCSI server/target for block level storage, or installing Windows server and creating  a bunch of Windows/CIFs shares over the network. There are some appliance like versions of the 3260 that have video surveillance software running on these as well, using local storage to house the digital video.   You really need to think of the 3260 as a VERY large server/Hardware (albeit multiple compute nodes and flexible ways to assigning drives between the two compute nodes).  You need to have some sort of plan as to what software/OS you want to run, when purchasing it.   Kirk... ... View more