The Cisco VIC 1280 (UCS-VIC-M82-8P) serves as the port expander card for the VIC 1240, specifically designed for the M3 generation of Cisco UCS B-Series Blade Servers. When paired, the VIC 1240 and VIC 1280 combine to deliver up to eight 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports, effectively doubling the original network throughput offered by the VIC 1240 alone. This configuration enables full fabric bandwidth utilization across both fabric interconnects, supporting high-bandwidth applications and environments that demand scalable I/O performance. The VIC 1280 doesn't function independently but acts as an expansion module, seamlessly integrated through the blade server architecture to unlock the VIC 1240’s full hardware capabilities