Cisco delivers next wave of Unified Computing innovation

Cisco has introduced significant innovations to its Unified Computing System™ (UCS), delivering a broader and more powerful portfolio of technologies to help customers capitalise on rapidly changing landscapes in business and IT.

Built on the architectural foundation, partnerships, and rapid customer adoption of UCS, Cisco’s expanded portfolio addresses new market segments and use cases with the introduction of Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers for cloud-scale applications, and Cisco UCS Mini for small-scale and enterprise-edge environments.
Additionally, an expansion of the current UCS portfolio brings new levels of power and scalability for a wide range of data centre workloads by unveiling new fourth-generation UCS Rack and Blade Servers for application performance, and new UCS Director solutions to manage Big Data infrastructure workloads.


“Rapid changes in the way applications are architected and delivered are being driven by the demands of Big Data, the Internet of Everything, mobility, video and cloud,” said Paul Perez, vice president and general manager, Cisco UCS. “We are in a new world where data sets and application scale are rapidly growing, and the opportunities for businesses to capitalise on the deeper intelligence and faster decisions they afford are really taking off. With this expanded portfolio, Cisco is delivering the largest wave of computing innovation since the original introduction of UCS – we are continually challenging and evolving how data centre infrastructure should be architected and managed.”


Cisco’s Unified Computing innovation extends the company’s strategy of application-centric data centre infrastructure, an approach designed to future-proof and create advantage for customers amid continuous change in IT and business. The new technology innovations include:


Cloud-Scale Computing
New Cisco UCS M-Series Modular Servers deliver breakthrough levels of operational efficiency for cloud service providers and enterprise customers who increasingly rely on scale-out application architectures. The UCS M-Series leapfrogs conventional scale-out system designs, leveraging Cisco’s UCS’s fabric computing for a leaner infrastructure for cloud scale applications.
In addition, the new Cisco UCS C3160 Rack Server, featuring high-capacity local disk storage, is ideal for distributed data analytics and object stores, unstructured data repositories, and media streaming and transcoding.


Edge-Scale Computing
Unified Computing innovation is now optimised for remote sites, branch offices, and small IT environments with the introduction of Cisco UCS Mini. This all-in-one solution delivers servers, storage and networking in a compact form factor that is easy to deploy and operate, bringing the benefits of UCS simplicity and IT automation to a new segment of customers. For customers operating large numbers of remote sites or branch offices, UCS systems management enables operations and policy control of distributed computing at a massive scale.


Data-Intensive Computing and Core Data Center Applications
New Fourth-generation UCS Servers and UCS Director products deliver power and control to accelerate intensive data analytics and a wide range of applications for improved business outcomes, including:
· The UCS B200 M4 Blade Server, C220 M4 and C240 M4 Rack Servers continue Cisco’s tradition of world-record application performance across a diverse range of workloads.
· UCS Director Express for Big Data creates a seamless management and automation environment that unifies big data and enterprise applications. Cisco innovation in partnership with SAP and Intel now delivers a single management pane for combined SAP HANA and Hadoop infrastructure.


According to a recent report by IDC, Cisco has achieved the ranking of No. 1 provider of x86 blade servers in the Americas, measured by revenue market share.

Cisco also demonstrated the highest industry growth in the total worldwide server market according to the IDC report, with 39% revenue growth on a cumulative four quarter basis ending in calendar Q1 of 2014, a period where other vendors in the top five posted flat or declining results.