New Cisco System Helps Customers Build Clouds, Deploy Business Applications Faster

Additions to Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio quadruple memory capacity, double switching capacity and simplify management for large-scale UCS deployments

IT organizations today are striving to establish data centers that support virtualization and cloud computing to become more competitive and agile, reduce the cost of physical infrastructure, and support the demands of data growth and Big Data analytics.  Cisco today announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System to deliver a third-generation fabric computing platform– which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management– to address these challenges and help customers respond rapidly to changing business needs, scale their data centers, and accelerate transition to virtualization andcloud computing.

The Cisco UCS third-generation fabric computing platform incorporates the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family and includes multiple server form factors delivering the industry’s highest server density and efficiency, with up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. 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.

UCS customers report dramatic operational and cost improvements up to: 30 percent lower infrastructure expenses, 90 percent reduction in deployment times, 40 percent improvements in application performance, and 60 percent reductions in power/cooling costs.

News Highlights

Unified Management with Cisco UCS

• Through enhanced integration with Cisco Unified Fabric technology, Cisco UCS Manager now unifies management for both blade and rack servers within a single domain. This industry-first capability reduces the cost of server connectivity, provides resource flexibility, and allows IT administrators to add data center capacity without additional complexity.

• 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.

Cisco UCS Integrated Networking and Virtualization

• 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 to deliver industry-leading application performance. The fabric interconnect provides infrastructure agility at scale with unified ports and greater energy efficiency, lowering watts per port by 36 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.

New M3 Generation Unified Computing System Servers 
Cisco broadens the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio with one blade and two rack-mount servers based on the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600. Available in March, Cisco’s new server lineup improves workload delivery with enhanced performance, flexibility, and efficiency to support increasing data center demands. With more cores, cache, memory capacity, and internal storage and faster communication pathways to move data more quickly, Cisco UCS with the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 offers the industry’s best performance, power efficiency, features, and cost.

• 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.

Application Performance Leadership

• Since Cisco UCS was introduced in 2009, it has captured 63 industry benchmark world records. With industry-leading application performance and a rapid, automated configuration model that speeds the deployment of applications, UCS makes performance predictable and increases business productivity. Cisco UCS is the ideal platform to support databases, Big Data, virtualization software, Java applications, HPC applications, and Web services.

Cisco Unified Computing System Industry Adoption

• Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers. Cisco UCS provides far greater benefits than simple convergence by unifying the compute, networking, virtualization, storage access, and management software as an integrated system to provide superior data center design flexibility and remove management barriers between blade and rack servers across bare metal, virtualized, and private/public cloud environments. Unifying data centers in this way allows customers to deploy business applications more rapidly, enhance revenue streams, introduce new business models, and grow their businesses while reducing IT costs.

• With approximately $5.8 billion in annual R&D spending, Cisco continues to innovate, driving data center transformation and helping businesses establish cloud computing environments more rapidly and cost-effectively. Cisco® Cloud Enablement Services, a comprehensive range of cloud professional and technical services, together with the Cisco CloudVerse architecture (which includes Unified Data Center technologies like UCS, intelligent networking, and applications working together), help customers build private, public or hybrid clouds; More than 70 percent of the top 50 public cloud providers deploy UCS.

• Cisco also collaborates with industry leaders like BMC Software, CA, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VCE, and VMware, on developing data center solutions that ease deployment and management of data center infrastructure and take the risk out of solution planning and speed deployment.

More Related News: Cisco’s UCS 3.0 Unveiled with Xeon Servers, Unified Management