Cisco Unveils New Servers for UCS Platform

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The new Cisco UCS B200 M3 server is a half-blade form factor with 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. (Photo: Cisco Systems)

Cisco has announced innovations across its Unified Computing System (UCS) to deliver a third-generation fabric computing platform that integrates network, compute, virtualization and management. The new systems are designed to help customers respond rapidly to changing business needs, scale their data centers, and accelerate their transition to virtualization and cloud computing.

The new servers feature the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 product family, which Cisco says will deliver up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. The third-generation platform includes multiple server form factors:

Fabric Integration

Integrating with the Unified Fabric technology, the Cisco UCS Manager now unifies management for both blade and rack servers within a single domain. 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 improved automation and orchestration for cloud environments.

"Our customers care most about time-to-deploy business applications, application performance and unified management of bare metal, virtualized and private/public cloud environments," said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco. "Cisco pioneered fabric computing and service profiles – still not duplicated by any other vendor- which allow IT managers to deploy applications in minutes instead of days. Now with innovations in UCS Manager, their integrated management spans rack and blade servers, and scales across data centers to thousands of servers globally"

Support for 80 Gbps and 160 Gbps down to each chassis from the I/O module, allowing for workload bursts. The I/O module also features port channeling, which allows load balancing across all ports to improve efficiency and resiliency through higher link utilization and bandwidth.  The 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 to deliver industry-leading application performance.

Cisco's Ranjit Nayak discusses server form-factor freedom, the unification of physical and virtual compute environments and a visual explanation of the UCS rack.