Cisco Updates its Unified Computing Systems (UCS)

Cisco announced a series of enhancements and upgrades to its Unified Computing System, which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management. The changes, which are aimed at delivering third-generation fabric computing, leverage the newly announced Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family and includes multiple server form factors. The new Intel silicon provides far greater server density and efficiency, with up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. In addition, the Cisco UCS Manager now allows IT administrators to manage both blade and rack servers as a common entity, and extends the management domain to span thousands of servers across data centers around the world.


In the second half of 2012, Cisco will introduce technology to support large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for multiple UCS domains, spanning thousands of servers either in a single data center or spread across data centers around the world, providing industry-leading automation and orchestration for cloud environments.


Some highlights:


The chassis I/O module 2204XP provides options for 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each chassis to handle workload bursts. The module also offers port channeling, which allows load balancing across all ports to improve efficiency and resiliency through higher link utilization and bandwidth.


The Cisco UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect doubles the switching capacity of the UCS fabric (from 960Gbps to 1.92Tbps) and reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent.


The Cisco UCS 6200 Series combined with the Cisco Nexus Fabric Extender extends Cisco UCS Manager benefits to larger scale UCS deployments for both blade and rack form factors.


Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server: The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M3 server provides performance, versatility, and density in a half-blade form factor, delivering balanced, industry-leading density through its 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. Greater density, performance and bandwidth mean business applications can run faster, more cost-effectively, and more efficiently.


UCS C220 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a one-rack-unit (1RU) server designed for performance and density for a wide range of business workloads, from Web services to distributed databases.


UCS C240 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a two-rack-unit (2RU) server designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration.


Cisco also cited growing market traction for UCS. Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers.
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