Cisco has released a host of new rack-mount and blade servers, I/O
technology, and multilayer switches in the second generation of its Unified
Computing System—an approach to data center architecture the company first
introduced last spring to improve efficiency, management and power consumption.
Sales of the systems include rewards targeted at partners, including the
standard back-end rebates, said John Growdon, director of Go-To-Market
Worldwide Channels at Cisco.
Growdon told Channel Insider that Cisco now has over 500 channel partners that
hold the DCNI certification (data center, network infrastructure). A subset of
those—about 200—are certified to resell Cisco’s B Series (blade server)
products.
In addition to the new product introductions rolled out today, Cisco is
offering “highly detailed cookbooks” of particular types of implementations,
including a multitenant architecture one for service providers that describes
how to set up a cloud service with UCS as the core of the architecture.
The second generation of UCS offers new servers based on Intel’s Xeon 5600
processor chips plus a new memory technology developed by Cisco that the
company said improves performance. Coming in the third quarter, Cisco will
offer new B-series (blade) and C-series (rack mount) four-socket servers based
on Intel’s Xeon 7500 series. Cisco says its system design provides for double
the memory capability and a nine-times increase in bandwidth.
Cisco’s new FEXlink (fabric extender) architecture is incorporated into both
Cisco Nexus and Cisco Unified Computing System Fabric Extenders, the company
said. FEXlink offers a server access layer that supports any fabric with 100Mb,
1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet; native Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet
(FCoE); InfiniBand over Ethernet; iSCSI; and NAS. Cisco said that its FEXlink
architecture will enable Cisco UCS to offer up to 160Gb of bandwidth per blade
in the coming year.
The Nexus portfolio’s new additions, Nexus 2248 and Nexus 2232, provide top of
rack and end of row 10-Gigabit Ethernet to the data center. The new products
follow on the success of the initial 2000-series FEXlink Nexus products, which
Cisco executives said they shipped 1 million ports of in less than a year.
Cisco said that the architecture of these switches enables 80 percent lower
cabling costs and 30 percent lower power conjunction.
Cisco also has expanded its Cisco Developer Network to include support for
partners developing to the UCS Manager.