Cisco Refreshes Datacenter Gear in UCS Push

There’s no sitting still at Cisco. The networking giant has unveiled a major upgrade of its rack and blade servers in its Unified Computing System line.

Enterprise Networking Planet has the details on Cisco’s big server refresh.

In a widespread refresh of its datacenter gear, networking giant Cisco Systems is updating its Unified Computing System (UCS) rack and blade servers with new Intel CPUs and an improved fabric extension architecture designed to simplify network management. Cisco’s Nexus and MDS switches are also being updated as part of the effort.

Cisco’s (NASDAQ:CSCO) rollout of its second-generation M2-series UCS offerings leverages Intel’s new Westmere CPUs to provide additional cores and performance. Cisco had previously talked up the UCS M2 series during Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Westmere product launch, though the products themselves debuted only this week this week as part of the official UCS generation-two product update.

There are five new Cisco UCS M2 servers powered by Intel Westmere CPUs, including the B200 M2 and the B250 M2 blade servers, each of which uses a two-socket Intel Xeon 5600 CPU. The B200M2 supports 12 DIMMs while the B250 M2 offers 48 DIMMs. On the rack-mounted server side, Cisco introduced the new C200 M2, a two-socket, 1U server with four disks and 12 DIMMs; the C210 M2, a two-socket, 2U design with 16 disks and 12 DIMMs; and the 2U, two-socket C250 M2 with eight disks and 48 DIMMs.

Read the full story at Enterprise Networking Planet:


Cisco Updates Unified Computing Servers With Westmere, FEX-Link