Cisco Adopts Intel Westmere CPU for UCS Blades

Cisco’s entry into the bladed server market was viewed with some skepticism, but it is gradually winning customers. Now, one year after that entry, the company has revamped the Unified Computer System with Intel’s new Xeon 5600 processor, the latest and greatest from Intel. Server Watch has the details on the new product.

Cisco is joining the string of technology vendors that will be adopting Intel’s new Xeon 5600 server chips.

Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) plans to include the new Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) x86 server chips, codenamed “Westmere,” in the next version of its Unified Computing System (UCS), which will be given the M2 designation.

The new Westmere chips will provide the UCS M2 with multiple performance gains, ranging as high as 42 percent for virtualization performance, over the previous M1. While Cisco is already touting the performance gains of the Westmere-powered UCS M2, it has yet to formally announce the new products. Cisco first announced UCS a year ago, and company executives told InternetNews.com this week that the plan is for an official launch of the new M2s sometime in the coming weeks.

“We haven’t announced availability yet — we’re sort of doing things a bit differently as we’re planning on making a series of announcements,” Daniel Bounds, a product marketing manager at Cisco, told InternetNews.com. “Ultimately, though, UCS is about more than just the compute node. We wanted to be there with Intel in announcing Westmere, but what we haven’t done yet is a larger announcement which will come in the coming weeks at which point we’ll announce availability, pricing and all of the specific product details.”

Read the full story at Datamation:


Cisco Planning New Westmere-Based x86 Servers