New Cisco UCS Servers: Redefining Scale Up, Scale Up and Scale Out

Today is a big day and a turning point in the server world with Cisco’s partner Intel launching a new line of Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v2 product family cpus.  These new processors  offer numerous  benefits over their predecessors summarized in the next slide.  In addition, the Cisco UCS instantiation of these processors provides unique cost saving benefits.

In lock step (or should we say “tick”-“tock”-“lock” step), Cisco is designing three new servers based on this new processor: the Cisco UCS  C460 M4 Rack Server (4-socket, four rack unit, rack server), B460 M4 Blade Server (4-socket, double, full-width blade server), and B260 M4 Blade Server (2-socket, full-width, blade server).

These new Cisco servers—like all Cisco UCS servers—have the inherent advantage of UCS Management and SingleConnect technology.  The Cisco UCS Manager abstracts all aspects of a server in software allowing administrators to create a software model (service profile) of a desired server and then instantiate that server all in software.    In other words, server hardware is abstracted and modeled in software.  UCS-managed servers can be provisioned and deployed in minutes instead of days.  The UCS server benefits customers are seeing  are indeed numerous and significant and summarized here.

Beyond these cost savings, these three UCS servers comprise the top-of-the line, high-end Cisco servers that address the most demanding, enterprise-critical, memory-intensive customer workloads including the following:

Business Intelligence

RISC Migration

Decision Support

In-memory Analytics

Large Databases

Large-Scale, Virtualized Applications

Enterprise-Critical Middleware

Large memory, consolidation workloads

These new UCS servers also present numerous other advantages that can be aggregated to six words: (Scale Up, Scale Up, Scale Out)

Scale Up — through UCS Manager and its service profiles, a workload can be easily moved to a larger, more powerful server.  The previous server’s service profile need only be instantiated on a new server. Load a new OS and the app and presto, new versions of the scale-up concept—easily move to a new bigger server.  The new server appears to both the OS and hypervisor exactly as the older server, except more resources are available.

Scale Up—the UCS B260 M4 blade server scales out to

160 Gbps of I/O bandwidth,

1.5 TB of memory with eventual scalability to 3.0 TB of memory

2 mezzanine slots and 1 built-in mLOM

Up to 2, 15-core, Intel® Xeon®  processor E7 v2s CPUs running at 155 Watts

An innovative design: The Cisco UCS B260 M4 server’s features a simple upgrade by adding another UCS B260 M4 blade module, along with the UCS M4 Scalable Connector, to double the compute, memory and I/O capability of the server.

Scale Out— these new Cisco servers inherit the benefits that all UCS Managed servers enjoy: fast, automatic, consistent, repeatable and error-free provisioning and deployment of servers.  In fact, an aggregate of UCS customers saved:

61% reduction of ongoing administrative/management costs

54% reduction in power & cooling

77% reduction in cabling with an average cost savings of 71%

41% reduction in other operations costs

84% reduction in provisioning times

The cost-savings, UCS innovation, performance and expansion of the Cisco UCS server product line continues apace.  Indeed today is a big day and an opportunity to examine the advantages of UCS servers.  See what other customers have already discovered that UCS is changing the shape of the industry: Cisco is ranked #2 world-wide in x86 blade server revenue market share, with 33.9% share in the US, and a top 5 ranking among server vendors overall.  Turn and consider, today, a new, better way to scale-up, scale-up and scale-out!

Please Click For More Information:

UCS B260 M4 Blade Server

UCS B460 M4 Blade Server

UCS C460 M4 Blade Server

UCS and Server Slides

UCS Performance Page

Girish Kulkarni’s Blog on Brickland Server Performance

Todd Brannon’s Blog on Innovative Scaling Options