New Intel Processors Power 5th Gen Cisco Servers

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Cisco has released a new generation of servers that it says will lower costs and speed up application services delivery.

Cisco’s Liz Centoni

The M5 Generation of the Cisco Unified Computing System uses Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which Intel announced this week. Cisco says the new processors improve memory and can increase the amount of workload data. The company says its blade servers have the highest graphical processing unit (GPU) density in the networking industry.

“As organizations strive to become more competitive through real-time analytics and faster decision-making, new thinking around data-center infrastructure is required,” said Liz Centoni, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Computing Systems Product Group. “Our unique, unified system architecture delivers the agility our customers need to create a cloud experience on-prem, so that our new line of servers simply means faster applications with fewer complications.”

The new generation includes six servers — half of them rack servers and the other half blade servers. Cisco also rolled out UCS Director 6.5, which provides a variety of automation tasks, as well as the Cisco Workload Optimization Manager, which syncs infrastructure supply with workload demand using analytics.

Scott Miller, senior director of World Wide Technology, says his company has seen an improvement in speed and performance since deploying the new servers.

“By reducing management and administrative concerns and costs, our customers will be able to speed up the delivery of applications while focusing more on addressing their immediate needs instead of performing constant infrastructure maintenance,” he said.

Read about the bevy of product announcements Cisco made a few weeks ago, as well as Kurt Marko’s analysis of where the company is headed. Cisco is emphasizing a shift in its identity from hardware-based to software-based — a move that many traditional IT vendors are making.