Cisco updates its Unified Computing System

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 announced innovations across its Unified Computing System to deliver a 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 and cloud 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.

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.

“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. Our open system allows for structured integration with partner and customer solutions, making the Cisco UCS and the Unified Data Center a strong foundation for rapid deployment, performance, scalability, and ease of management,” he added.