Cisco Unified Computing System: Cloud, Virtualization Upgrades

Written by CJ Arlotta
March 14, 2012

Cisco has announced new developments across its Unified Computing System to deliver a third-generation fabric computing system. As you may recall, UCS integrates network, compute, virtualization and management. Cisco claims the upgrades will help partners to scale customer data centers, while accelerating the transition to virtualization and cloud computing.

Side note: The VAR Guy has spotted some updated information about Cisco’s server sales and UCS revenues. But that’s a blog for another day — real soon. In the meantime, here’s a bullet-by-bullet rundown of Cisco’s new enhancements. And yes, the info comes straight from Cisco…

Unified Management with Cisco UCS

Cisco UCS Manager, through integration with Cisco Unified Fabric technology, unifies management for both blade and rack servers with a single domain.
Later this year, Cisco will introduce technology to support large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for multiple UCS domains, which allows spanning thousands of servers either in a single data center or spread across data centers around the world.

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 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

One blade and two rack-mount servers broadens the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio based on the latest Intel Xeon processor E5-2600. Cisco’s new server lineup will be available in March and seeks to improve workload delivery with enhanced performance, flexibility, and efficiency to support increasing data center demands. Cisco hopes that with more cores, cache, memory capacity and internal storage, pathways will move data more quickly.

And coming soon: The VAR Guy’s analysis