Cisco UCS M5 C-Series Rack Servers – Evolution and Revolution

Tuesday we announced our fifth generation of Cisco UCS servers. Today, I want to take a deeper look at the M5 rack servers. If you are interested in our new blade offerings, check out my blog from yesterday.

We put our hard drive sleds on a diet and the C220 M5 bulked up. Customers asked for more storage on the 1RU C220 M5 and we delivered. It now supports 10 SFF SAS/SATA/SSD/NVMe drives, a 20% increase. If SFF isn’t your thing, it also comes in a four drive LFF version. If you don’t want to give up a pair of drives for your boot OS, you can use the new dual M.2 SATA storage devices of up to 960GB common on all M5 servers.

Like with the B200 M5, the C220 M5 (and the C240 M5) gained 20% more cores per socket (56 cores total) with the Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. If you have more cores, you’ll probably want more memory. All our two socket servers support up to 3TB of DDR4 2666MHz memory.

Continuing to listen to customers, on the 2RU C240 M5 we moved the two OS drives external and made them hot-pluggable. Now on the same RAID controller as the front 24 SFF drives, customers have 26 high performance SFF drives totaling almost 200TB.

All of the new M5 rack servers have two 10GbE LOMs as well as support for Cisco VICs and integration into UCS Manager with SingleConnect technology. SingleConnect allows you to collapse your data, storage, and management onto a single network and provides significant CapEx and OpEx savings from reduced port counts, cables, and management. All of our rack servers can be managed standalone through their CIMC (our BMC), centrally through the CIMC with Cisco IMC Supervisor, or with UCS Manager as mentioned above. When you use UCS Manager, you will get a consistent management experience regardless of workload or server type: blade, rack, or dense storage server.

All of the M5 servers are 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.

We completely redesigned our 4-socket server with the C480 M5. With lessons learned from the C3160 and S3260 dense storage server, we put the CPUs and memory on trays making them modular. We realize through our conversations with customers that you make a significant investment in the sheet metal, drives, and PCIe options as well as installation and hooking it up to the network. When future CPU and memory technology come along, that investment is protected. Now all you have to do is swap out the CPU/memory module to take advantage of better performing parts. No need to run new cables or new network hook-ups.

The improvements don’t stop there. The C480 M5 now supports 32 SFF drives (24 front loading and 8 top loading) and has 12 PCIe slots with triple the GPU capacity of up to 6. GPU density is a key metric for both deep learning and VDI which the C480 M5 delivers on.

With all of this modularity, improvements, and 6TB of memory, the C480 M5 is ready to take on the most demanding workloads.

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