SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 8, 2012 – IT organizations today are striving to establish data centers that support virtualization and cloud computing to become more competitive and agile, reduce the cost of physical infrastructure, and support the demands of data growth and Big Data analytics.  Cisco today announced innovations across the Cisco Unified Computing System™ to deliver a third-generation fabric computing platform– which integrates network, compute, virtualization and management– to address these challenges and help customers respond rapidly to changing business needs, scale their data centers, and accelerate transition to virtualization and cloud computing.

The Cisco UCS™ third-generation fabric computing platform incorporates the new Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family and includes multiple server form factors delivering the industry's highest server density and efficiency, with up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O compared to previous UCS servers. The Cisco UCS Manager now allows IT administrators to manage both blade and rack servers as a common entity, and extends the management domain to span thousands of servers across data centers around the world.

UCS customers report dramatic operational and cost improvements up to: 30 percent lower infrastructure expenses, 90 percent reduction in deployment times, 40 percent improvements in application performance, and 60 percent reductions in power/cooling costs.

News Highlights

Unified Management with Cisco UCS

• Through enhanced integration with Cisco Unified Fabric technology, Cisco UCS Manager now unifies management for both blade and rack servers within a single domain. This industry-first capability reduces the cost of server connectivity, provides resource flexibility, and allows IT administrators to add data center capacity without additional complexity.
• In the second half of 2012, Cisco will introduce technology to support large-scale UCS deployments through centralized management for multiple UCS domains, spanning thousands of servers either in a single data center or spread across data centers around the world, providing industry-leading automation and orchestration for cloud environments.

Cisco UCS Integrated Networking and Virtualization

• The chassis I/O module 2204XP provides options for 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each chassis to handle workload bursts. The module also offers port channeling, which allows load balancing across all ports to improve efficiency and resiliency through higher link utilization and bandwidth.
• The Cisco UCS 6296UP Fabric Interconnect doubles the switching capacity of the UCS fabric (from 960Gbps to 1.92Tbps) and reduces end-to-end latency by 40 percent to deliver industry-leading application performance. The fabric interconnect provides infrastructure agility at scale with unified ports and greater energy efficiency, lowering watts per port by 36 percent.  
• The Cisco UCS 6200 Series combined with the Cisco Nexus® Fabric Extender extends Cisco UCS Manager benefits to larger scale UCS deployments for both blade and rack form factors.

New M3 Generation Unified Computing System Servers
Cisco broadens the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio with one blade and two rack-mount servers based on the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600. Available in March, Cisco's new server lineup improves workload delivery with enhanced performance, flexibility, and efficiency to support increasing data center demands. With more cores, cache, memory capacity, and internal storage and faster communication pathways to move data more quickly, Cisco UCS with the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 offers the industry's best performance, power efficiency, features, and cost.

• Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server:  The enterprise-class Cisco UCS B200 M3 server provides performance, versatility, and density in a half-blade form factor, delivering balanced, industry-leading density through its 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth. Greater density, performance and bandwidth mean business applications can run faster, more cost-effectively, and more efficiently.    
• UCS C220 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a one-rack-unit (1RU) server designed for performance and density for a wide range of business workloads, from Web services to distributed databases.
• UCS C240 M3 Rack Server: The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a two-rack-unit (2RU) server designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration.

Application Performance Leadership

• Since Cisco UCS was introduced in 2009, it has captured 63 industry benchmark world records. With industry-leading application performance and a rapid, automated configuration model that speeds the deployment of applications, UCS makes performance predictable and increases business productivity. Cisco UCS is the ideal platform to support databases, Big Data, virtualization software, Java applications, HPC applications, and Web services. 

Cisco Unified Computing System Industry Adoption

• Since it was introduced in, 2009, nearly 11,000 customers worldwide have deployed Cisco UCS to unify their data centers. Cisco UCS provides far greater benefits than simple convergence by unifying the compute, networking, virtualization, storage access, and management software as an integrated system to provide superior data center design flexibility and remove management barriers between blade and rack servers across bare metal, virtualized, and private/public cloud environments. Unifying data centers in this way allows customers to deploy business applications more rapidly, enhance revenue streams, introduce new business models, and grow their businesses while reducing IT costs.
• With approximately $5.8 billion in annual R&D spending, Cisco continues to innovate, driving data center transformation and helping businesses establish cloud computing environments more rapidly and cost-effectively. Cisco® Cloud Enablement Services, a comprehensive range of cloud professional and technical services, together with the Cisco CloudVerse architecture (which includes Unified Data Center technologies like UCS, intelligent networking, and applications working together), help customers build private, public or hybrid clouds; More than 70 percent of the top 50 public cloud providers deploy UCS.
• Cisco also collaborates with industry leaders like BMC Software, CA, Citrix, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, VCE, and VMware, on developing data center solutions that ease deployment and management of data center infrastructure and take the risk out of solution planning and speed deployment.

Supportive Quotes

Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, SunGard Availability Services

"The conversation around cloud today has changed from 'if' to 'how', and IT organizations are trying to figure out how to use the cloud for running tier-1 production applications," said Indu Kodukula, Executive Vice President Products and Chief Technology Officer at SunGard Availability Services. "An enterprise-grade cloud service such as SunGard's, built and delivered on pre-integrated, premium infrastructure such as Cisco UCS and VBlock from VCE, is critical to making cloud ready for production. The pre-integration of compute and networking in VBlock, combined with open standards and customizable service profiles, enables virtual data centers to be spun up on short notice and provides a level of business agility without sacrificing application availability."

Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive

"As the second-largest privately owned dealership group in the United States, we experienced server and desktop sprawl that required a more manageable, cost-effective unified data center approach, and we chose shared infrastructure FlexPod, with unique integration management of UCS and NetApp unified storage, as the best solution for our private cloud infrastructure," said Robert Taylor, director of IT, Hendrick Automotive. It used to take weeks to deploy a new business application, but now we can do it in a day.  Now senior management views IT as a business enabler that significantly increases our business agility."

Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst ZK Research

"Companies are not using the same networking gear they were a few years ago, so why should they use the same servers," said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst  at ZK Research. Customers are not averse to change if the benefits are high enough.  Cisco built UCS with virtual and cloud computing in mind and now its competitors are trying to catch up. And Cisco has an especially strong offering now with its latest advances in fabric computing and enhancements to UCS Manager."

Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco

"Our customers care most about time-to-deploy business applications, application performance and unified management of bare metal, virtualized and private/public cloud environments," said Soni Jiandani, senior vice president, Data Center Group, Cisco. "Cisco pioneered fabric computing and service profiles – still not duplicated by any other vendor- which allow IT managers to deploy applications in minutes instead of days. Now with innovations in UCS Manager their integrated management spans rack and blade servers, and scales across data centers to thousands of servers globally.  Our open system allows for structured integration with partner and customer solutions, making the Cisco UCS and the Unified Data Center a strong foundation  for rapid deployment, performance, scalability, and ease of management."

Supportive Resources:

• Learn more about Cisco Unified Computing
• Read more: Cisco UCS Industry Benchmarks and Application Performance Records
• View Cisco UCS industry awards
• View UCS customer success videos and case studies

• Read Cisco Data Center blog
• Cisco Data Center Social Media
• Cisco Data Center Services website
• Follow Cisco on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

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