Cisco announces a major refresh of its Unified Computing System (UCS) business as it launches the M-Series modular servers for cloud-scale applications and UCS Mini for small-scale and enterprise-edge environments.
Also unveiled are 4th generation UCS rack (C-Series) and blade (B-Series) servers for application performance and UCS Director solutions for big data infrastructure workload management.
“We are in a new world where data sets and application scale are rapidly growing, and the opportunities for businesses to capitalize on the deeper intelligence and faster decisions they afford are really taking off," the company says. "With this expanded portfolio, Cisco is delivering the largest wave of computing innovation since the original introduction of UCS-- we are continually challenging and evolving how data center infrastructure should be architected and managed.”
According to Cisco M-Series modular servers deliver "breakthrough" operational efficiency, with System Link technology promising "the industry’s first true disaggregated server architecture for leaner cloud-scale infrastructure."
As the company puts it System Link technology eliminates up to 95% of duplicated system components to deliver up to 36% combined TCO savings.
In addition the new the UCS C3160 rack server features high-capacity local disk storage, making it ideal for distributed data analytics and object stores, unstructured data repositories, and media streaming and transcoding.
For small IT environments, remote sites and branch offices Cisco offers the UCS Mini-- an all-in-one solution packing servers, storage and networking in a compact, easy to deploy form factor.
It uses a B-Series chassis and blade servers with the 6324 Fabric interconnect, restricting it to up to maximum of 15 servers (x8 blade servers and x7 rack servers).
New UCS blade and rack servers include the B200 M4, C220 M4 and C240 M4, all based on the upcoming Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 processors.
The final Cisco announcement is UCS Director Express for Big Data, a single-touch solution for automated Hadoop deployment. It provides a single management pane across both physical infrastructure and Hadoop software, and is integrated with major open-source distributions for consistent and repeatable Hadoop UCS cluster configurations.
Go Cisco Delivers Next Wave of Unified Computing Innovations