Expansion of Cisco’s Unified Computing System Family to Include C-Series Rack-Mount Servers
New form factor helps address a broader spectrum of compute requirements for data centers.
At it’s 2009 Partner Summit in Boston this week, Cisco announced a product line extension to its Unified Computing System (UCS) with the addition of a new form factor, the C-Series rack-mount servers. The rack-mount servers extend the Unified Computing System to customers who require rack-mount servers; together with the company’s UCS blade servers, Cisco’s Unified Computing System addresses a broader spectrum of compute requirements for next-generation data centers.
“Cisco’s comprehensive Unified Computing System architecture allows us to easily offer new form factors that respond quickly to our customers’ needs,” says Prem Jain, senior vice president, server and access virtualization business unit for Cisco. “With the UCS C-Series rack-mount servers, we are opening the Unified Computing opportunity to a broader range of our channel partner community while providing our customers a migration path to the unified computing approach of the future.”
The UCS C-Series servers will offer several new features, including:
- Access to unified fabric through a low-latency lossless 10-gigabits-per-second Ethernet foundation that enables a “wire-once” deployment model.
- Cisco patented memory extension technology that yields more than 2.5 times the addressable memory of currently available two-socket rack-mount platforms, according to the vendor, which provides the ability to support more virtual machines per server and to deliver the scalability to run large memory applications.
- Cisco virtualized adapter that provides adapter consolidation and virtualization optimization capabilities by enabling each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections.
Based on Intel Xeon 5500 series processors, Cisco UCS C-Series rack-mount servers will adapt processor performance to application demands and scale energy use based on utilization.
The servers are scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter of calendar year 2009.
