Cisco UCS News: New Servers and Making Some Waves
Well, boys and girls, I have got a couple of cool things to report on the Cisco Unified Computing System front. First, and foremost, I am happy to present the latest iteration of the UCS: the C-Series rack servers.
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The Cisco UCS C250 M1 server is a two-socket 2 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server with patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology designed to increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads |
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The Cisco UCS C210 M1 server is a general-purpose, two-socket, 2RU rack-mount server. Housing up to 16 internal disk drives for up to 8 TB of storage, the UCS C210 M1 is designed to balance performance, density, and efficiency for workloads requiring economical, high-capacity, reliable, internal storage |
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The Cisco UCS C200 M1 server is a two-socket, 1RU rack-mount server designed to balance simplicity, performance, and density for production-level virtualization, web infrastructure, and other mainstream data center workloads |
You can follow each of the product links for details, but here is a quick snapshot of the differences between the models. The C200 and C210 will be available in November and the C250 well be here in time to tuck under the Christmas tree of that special server geek on your Christmas list.
On the UCS traction front, Gartner has released their Blade Server Magic Quadrant. While licensing restrictions preclude me from showing you the quadrant, I can discuss the results. Gartner has placed us in the Visionaries quadrant, which we believe is great place for us to debut (the positions in the Quadrant are based on completeness of vision and ability to execute). Since we are newcomers to this market, this is a fair assessment as we have to prove ourselves against the incumbent vendors. As we continue to deliver product innovation and increase customer momentum, we expect our position in the Magic Quadrant to change over time.
Finally, Gartner noted that they see an uptick in the number of conversations that they are having around UCS—that there is a high level of market interest. I was have having coffee with my old boss yesterday (he is now back in the field) and he mirrored this sentiment—every one of his customers—and these are large enterprise accounts—is interested in the UCS, regardless of what they already have in place.
To wrap things up, I was going to dig into to some cool news on the Oracle front, but this post is already long enough, so perhaps I will save that for next time.
Posted by Omar Sultan at 10:35AM PST
Steve Kaplan Oct 9, 2009
I can certainly confirm your former boss’ comments about customer interest in UCS. Though we inevitably have to initiate the conversation, we find customers very quickly grasp the capabilties of UCS as a virtualized data center enabling platform, and that POs often follow quickly thereafter.
I do have a question about C-Series. Why all the HD space when shared storage will be standard?