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CISCO PARTNER SUMMIT — Cisco on Tuesday announced a new addition – the S-Series – to its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS).

The UCS S3260, the first product in the family, is designed to address the massive increases in the amount of data that’s stored and being actively retrieved.

The new storage-optimized server in the S-Series targets data-intensive workloads, such as big data, streaming media and collaborative applications, as well as the business need to deploy software-defined storage, object storage, and data-protection solutions. The announcement was made at Cisco Partner Summit 2016, being held this week in San Francisco.

Historically, storage-intensive applications – such as video storage, electronic medical records, warehoused data and sensor data collection – are beginning to change.

“In the realm of health care, for example, we’re seeing patient data – including medical images – be stored in electronic medical records and then retrieved and used, but now we’re seeing more of a real-time use of diagnostic imaging. So when providers are with the patient, they’re using diagnostic imaging to spot the trouble, do faster diagnosis, and have better outcomes — so it’s much more compute-intensive,” said Todd Brannon, director of product marketing with the Cisco computing systems product group. Even the enterprise data is now being streamed and analyzed in real time for decision-making, he added.{ad}

The term being used for this active data, or data being accessed and analyzed for real-time insights, is “un-stored” data.

The UCS S3260 storage server targets businesses and workloads putting demands on un-stored data. According to Cisco, the new server reduces CapEx by up to 34 percent, lowers ongoing management by up to 80 percent, reduces cabling by up to 70 percent, takes up 60 percent less space; and consumes up to 59 percent less power — compared to traditional servers.

Brannon contends that existing on-premises infrastructure and public cloud have been holding IT back from actively using stored data. On one hand, on-premises infrastructure has been slow to scale, is costly, and doesn’t provide APIs for developers. Cloud, on the other hand, is expensive for hot data, and organizations may confront data sovereignty, security and governance challenges. “In terms of long-term use, putting things out in the cloud may not be the most economically advantageous way to go. And then there [are] just some types of data that [don’t] belong in the cloud to begin with,” he said.

The UCS S-Series, a modular platform architecture, solves on-premises issues such as speed, cost and open APIs, and combined with Cisco’s next generation of its ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite – also announced Tuesday – provides public cloud connectivity for cases where customers require a hybrid cloud solution.

There are four versions of the ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite: Infrastructure Automation; Service Management; Cloud Management; and Big Data Automation — which can be used individually or in any combination.

“In the context of digital transformation, data that’s only stored is effectively useless. It’s only when data is being actively used to create insight and trigger action will it really make a difference,” said Brannon.