Cisco Touts Gains for C260 Rack-Mount Server

CiscoUCS-C260-M2

A close-up of the new Cisco Unified Computing System C260 M2 rack-mount server.

When Cisco Systems announced new products for its Unified Computing System last week, much of the news coverage focused on the company's rollout of new switches and enhancements to its network fabric offerings. But Cisco also introduced a new rack-mount server, the UCS C260 M2, along with updates of existing server lines to take advantage of Intel's newest processor.

On Tuesday Cisco highlighted the performance of its newest servers, citing the results of Intel benchmarking in which Cisco gear notched established several performance records. Cisco entered the server market only last year, introducing them as part of its Unified Computing System (UCS), a scalable, modular architecture that enables consolidation of servers and storage in a unified network fabric.

New Servers

Following Intel's announcement of the Xeon Processor E7 family, Cisco introduced the UCS C260 ME rack-mount server and new versions of the UCS B230 M2, B440 M2 and C460 M2.  The UCS C260 M2 can  be configured with up to two Intel E7-2800 10-core processors,offers up to 1TB of memory and can expand to 9.6TB of local storage or 16 SSD’s alternatively. This CiscoDataCenter video data sheet  explores the product's features.

The new servers expand the UCS server portfolio, which now features nine different nine form factors. Cisco pairs its memory extension technology with the new Intel E7 family to provide two to four times the memory (up to 1TB) and support up to four times the number of virtual machines per server as legacy systems today.

New Benchmark Records

With the release of Intel E7 benchmark results, Cisco recorded nine records using VMware VMMark, TPPC (Transaction Processing Performance Council) and SPEC (Standards Performance Evaluation Corporation) benchmarks. Using a UCS C460 M2 and VMware ESX 4.1 a world record was established at 16.68 for data center virtualized server management on the VMmark 2.0 benchmark.  Eight SPEC benchmarks were awarded to Cisco as well for high performance computing, technical computing, general purpose computing and server-side Java Middle-ware.

SGI also recorded four world records in the Intel benchmarking with its Altix products, which set new marks in Technical Computing and General Purpose Computing.The Altix line is optimized for complex workloads such as large database management, real-time analytics, and complex scientific and engineering simulations.

"The Altix UV system has become the standard for providing developers and users with the ability to make faster and more informed mission-critical business decisions based on more complete data," said SGI CTO Dr. Eng Lim Goh. "By incorporating more robust Intel® Xeon® E7 processors, Altix UV provides a platform that is unmatched in terms of performance with an open standards approach."

Last month Oracle announced a world record result with the SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark.  The Oracle WebLogic Server with Oracle Database 11g was running on two Cisco UCS B440 M1 Blade Servers, each with four, eight-core Intel Xeon x7560 2.26GHz processors.