We've seen an uptick in "direct attach" storage deployments on the Cisco UCS 2.0 platform lately-- and there doesn't' seem to be a lot of good information available for this type of deployment. It's not hard to make work-- in fact, rather simple-- but once you go down to the hypervisor level, there seems to be much confusion and little detail available from Cisco or otherwise.

First, it's important to understand what "direct attach storage" means in the Cisco UCS context. If you were to take your storage array (only a handful of them are certified by Cisco for this deployment mind you) and connect it directly in to the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects, it would be considered a "direct attach" deployment. This type of connectivity uses "Appliance" ports, which you simply configure though the UCS Manager by select the desired interface, and "Configure as Appliance port".