New Cisco Unified Computing System Innovations Help Customers Build Clouds, Deploy Business Applications Faster
March 8, 2012IT 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 /quotes/zigman/20039/quotes/nls/csco CSCO +0.88% today announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System(TM) to deliver a third-generation fabric 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…
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.
News Highlights Unified Management with Cisco UCS
— Through enhanced integration with Cisco Unified Fabric technology,
Cisco UCS Manager now unifies management for both blade and rack
servers within a single domain. This industry-first capability reduces
the cost of server connectivity, provides resource flexibility, and
allows IT administrators to add data center capacity without
additional complexity.
— In the second half of 2012, Cisco will introduce technology to support
large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for
multiple UCS domains, spanning thousands of servers either in a single
data center or spread across data centers around the world, providing
industry-leading automation and orchestration for cloud environments.
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(R) 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 Cisco broadens the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio with one blade and two rack-mount servers based on the latest Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor E5-2600. Available in March, Cisco’s new server lineup improves workload delivery with enhanced performance, flexibility, and efficiency to support increasing data center demands. With more cores, cache, memory capacity, and internal storage and faster communication pathways to move data more quickly, Cisco UCS with the Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor E5-2600 offers the industry’s best performance, power efficiency, features, and cost.
— Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server: The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M3
server provides performance, versatility, and density in a half-blade
form factor, delivering balanced, industry-leading density through its
24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. Greater density,
performance and bandwidth mean business applications can run faster,
more cost-effectively, and more efficiently.
— UCS C220 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a
one-rack-unit (1RU) server designed for performance and density for a
wide range of business workloads, from Web services to distributed
databases.
— UCS C240 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a
two-rack-unit (2RU) server designed for both performance and
expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure
workloads, from big data to collaboration.
Application Performance Leadership
— Since Cisco UCS was introduced in 2009, it has captured 63 industry
benchmark world records. With industry-leading application performance
and a rapid, automated configuration model that speeds the deployment
of applications, UCS makes performance predictable and increases
business productivity. Cisco UCS is the ideal platform to support
databases, Big Data, virtualization software, Java applications, HPC
applications, and Web services.
Cisco Unified Computing System Industry Adoption
— Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide
have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers. Cisco UCS
provides far greater benefits than simple convergence by unifying the
compute, networking, virtualization, storage access, and management
software as an integrated system to provide superior data center
design flexibility and remove management barriers between blade and
rack servers across bare metal, virtualized, and private/public cloud
environments. Unifying data centers in this way allows customers to
deploy business applications more rapidly, enhance revenue streams,
introduce new business models, and grow their businesses while
reducing IT costs.
— With approximately $5.8 billion in annual R&D spending, Cisco
continues to innovate, driving data center transformation and helping
businesses establish cloud computing environments more rapidly and
cost-effectively. Cisco(R) Cloud Enablement Services, a
comprehensive range of cloud professional and technical services,
together with the Cisco CloudVerse architecture (which includes
Unified Data Center technologies like UCS, intelligent networking, and
applications working together), help customers build private, public
or hybrid clouds; More than 70 percent of the top 50 public cloud
providers deploy UCS.
— Cisco also collaborates with industry leaders like BMC Software, CA,
Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat,
SAP, VCE, and VMware, on developing data center solutions that ease
deployment and management of data center infrastructure and take the
risk out of solution planning and speed deployment.
Supportive Quotes
Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, SunGard Availability Services "The conversation around cloud today has changed from ‘if’ to ‘how,’ and IT organizations are trying to figure out how to use the cloud for running tier-1 production applications," said Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President Products and Chief Technology Officer at SunGard Availability Services. "An enterprise-grade cloud service such as SunGard’s, built and delivered on pre-integrated, premium infrastructure such as Cisco UCS and VBlock from VCE, is critical to making cloud ready for production. The pre-integration of compute and networking in VBlock, combined with open standards and customizable service profiles, enables virtual data centers to be spun up on short notice and provides a level of business agility without sacrificing application availability."
Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive "As the second-largest privately owned dealership group in the United States, we experienced server and desktop sprawl that required a more manageable, cost-effective unified data center approach, and we chose shared infrastructure FlexPod, with unique integration management of UCS and NetApp unified storage, as the best solution for our private cloud infrastructure," said Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive. "It used to take weeks to deploy a new business application, but now we can do it in a day. Now senior management views IT as a business enabler that significantly increases our business agility."
Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco "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."