More of everything you love with Cisco UCS M5 Blade Servers

Yesterday we announced our fifth generation of UCS servers. Today I want to take a deeper look at the M5 blade servers. Tomorrow, I’ll tackle the M5 rack servers.

More! More! More!

The B200 M5 Blade Server has more of everything you love. More cores, more memory, more GPUs. Based on the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the B200 M5 server supports up to 56 cores (28 cores per socket), and up to 3TB of 2666MHz memory.

The two front drives and RAID controller are modular like on the B200 M4. This means if you are stateless and booting from SAN, you aren’t burdened with that extra cost. Like on any blade server, that very valuable real estate should be used for something so we added support for a second GPU. Cisco is the only server vendor offering two GPUs on a half-width blade!

Also, new to our blade and rack servers is support for dual M.2 SATA storage devices, up to 960GB. This gives you more flexibility and speed than using SD cards for your OS boot images. We will be updating the M.2 form factor to support NVMe later this year.

Speaking of NVMe, all of our blades support 7.7TB SFF NVMe drives and NVMe mezzanine adapters of 560GB or 3.2TB.

If two sockets and 3TB of memory isn’t enough for your application, we have you covered with the new B480 M5 Blade Server. The B480 M5 is a four socket server supporting up to 6TB of memory. With the common socket that all new Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs support (Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum), we are able to simplify our blade product portfolio. The B480 M5 replaces the B260 M4, B420 M4, and B460 M4 servers. And unlike those servers, the B480 M5 supports four GPUs! Similar to the B200 M5, if you don’t need local storage, you can have two GPUs up front in addition to the two in back.

As you can see, our new blades offer very flexible configurations. You can go storage heavy with up to 160Gbps of network throughput, storage light with GPUs, or other combinations as you see fit.

Best of all, there is no forklift upgrade required to take advantage of all the new goodness! The new M5 blade servers will work in the original UCS 5108 Chassis we launched in 2009. They are also Starship ready. Starship is cloud-based management and advanced operation analytics. This generation of UCS systems has all the hooks in place for integration with Starship when that platform launches later this year.

For more information on all of our Cisco UCS M5 servers, go to www.cisco.com/go/ucs.