Live Blog: Cisco UCS Announcement

Cisco Systems (CSCO) held a live event for its Unified Computing Systems (UCS) announcement at the Intercontinental Hotel in Manhattan, where the company spoke about its plans for helping to bring partners into the Internet of Everything (IoE) and ways it is working to develop the concept of Fast IT.

Frank Palumbo, Cisco senior vice president of Global Data Center and Virtualization Sales, kicked off the event by talking about the disruptive and opportunistic possibilites created by the Internet of Everything, and how Cisco aims to provide its customers and resellers with the technology to bring their computing to the next level.

Next, Padmashree Warrior, Cisco chief technology and strategy officer, spoke in earnest about “Fast IT” and how the rapid change in technology is transforming ordinary businesses into technology companies. Fast IT is the operating model developed by Cisco to keep up with the advances made by the Internet of Everything, in which CIOs become business partners rather than administrative support, according to Warrior.

Warrior compared the pace of change of the physical storefront with the change seen in many popular businsses, such as the shift from physical bookstores to Amazon.com and music stores to digital distribution models. All of these disruptions have technology at an infrastructure level, and this is the pace of change that Cisco is looking to utilize.

“Businesses used to be defined and categorized by brick and mortar characteristics,” said Warrior. “Those brick and mortar stores have today become cloud businesses.”

Fast IT, she said, will have three pillars: smart, simple and secure computing. Cisco also recognizes it needs to leverage and extend its partner network, with the company announcing an expanded partnership with Red Hat to integrated the company’s infrastructure with OpenStack.

Paul Perez, vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco’s Data Center Group, noted the new UCS portfolio aims to expand the company’s business into edge-scale computing, as more and more servers are now located in remote locations and branch offices. This led into the day’s big hardware announcements.

Satinder Sethi, vice president of Data Center Solutions Engineering, took the stage to announce Cisco’s fourth-generation rack and blade servers, as well as the UCS Mini platform and UCS M-Series modular servers for cloud computing.

Sethi said Cisco has focused its fourth-generation servers on delivering new fabric and performance capabilities to users while also including support for new Intel processers with up to 1.5TB of memory on a single server. UCS Director, meanwhile, enables users to manage their infrastructure with Hadoop integrated application containers and application-centric infrastructure configuration. UCS Director also will feature an open developer kit for ecosystem acceleration.

The UCS Mini was designed for edge-scale computing done outside of the data center, while the M-Series platform was designed for cloud environments. Sethi said these solutions will take advantage of Cisco’s System Link technology and help bring users into the IoE era.

Remember to check back to the VAR Guy for more news and updates on Cisco’s UCS announcement as they develop.