Back in March Cisco announced the 3rd generation of UCS fabric computing. Many new innovations were introduced including the 2204XP IO module (which provides options for 80 Gbps and 160 Gbps bandwidth), the VIC 1240 which will be embedded in the B200 M3 (30-percent decrease in CPU utilization and a big drop in latency when running virtualized applications), new servers with Xeon E5-2600 processors, and the Multi-UCS manager. These are very exciting new developments. I would like to go into further detail on the last two.
I have always discussed Cisco's ultimate goal of datacenter deployment with our customer's during deployment and knowledge transfer. Cisco is not deploying a new blade center technology, they are deploying a datacenter solution. The goal is to ease the deployment and standardization of compute hardware in the datacenter, not just deploy a few servers for a hardware refresh. The next big step is to be able to manage multiple chassis through multiple datacenters. The Multi-UCS Manager is to be released the second half 2012. This manager provides a unified management fabric for geographically dispersed UCS pods including both blade chassis and rack mount servers. This technology will tie multiple sites together into one unified compute pool if up to 10,000 servers. This allows us to expand the single pane of glass that allows us to mange our whole infrastructure.
Cisco also released 3 new servers to add additional compute options to the datacenter.
The Cisco UCS B200 M3 blades server is a half-blade form factor with an Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processor product family, up to 384 GB of RAM across 24 DIMM slots, two hard drives, and up to 8 x 10GE with the VIC 1240. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12288/index.html
The UCS 220 M3 Rack server is a 1U server with an Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processor product family and offers up to 256 GB of RAM, eight drives or SSDs, and two 1GE LAN interfaces built into the motherboard. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12369/index.html
The UCS C240 M3 Rack server is a 2U server with an Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 processor product family with up to 384 GB of RAM, 24 drives, and four 1GE LAN interfaces. http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps12370/index.html
In addition to the new infra and blade hardware further development has been made in the UCS XML API. Details to follow. Reference: goUCS automation tool.
I am excited for things to come in the next year. Lets hope to see vMotion type service profile moves as well as vCenter/UIM integration into the VM tab. I can't wait for the days of right click deployment of an ESX service profile, OS, and integration into vCenter.
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