The amount of data being generated and stored is only getting bigger. You need more memory and better performance to quickly extract actionable intelligence. What if there was a way to supersize your server memory capacity? Even better, what if that memory was not only fast, but persistent?

Persistent Memory for Storage or RAM Delivers Big Benefits to Existing OS and Applications

Today Cisco is announcing its participation in the Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory Hardware Beta Program. The UCS B200 M5, B480 M5, C220 M5, C240 M5, C480 M5, and S3260 M5 were designed for half their DIMM slots to utilize Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory. With Intel’s persistent memory modules, supporting up to 512GB, our two-socket servers can support 6TB of persistent memory and 1.5TB of regular DDR4 memory. Persistent memory can be used for storage (like a SSD in application direct mode) or as RAM for applications. This means a two-socket server can deliver big memory benefits to existing OS and applications. Double that for four-socket servers!

Now you can load your databases into persistent memory once and eliminate the bottleneck of reloading the data into memory each time the server boots. This means real time savings – think of having a server ready to go in two minutes instead of 20. Persistent memory also lowers latency by allowing access to stored data on the memory bus rather than going across the I/O bus. This gives you faster insights, achieving better business results.

Persistent Memory Means Hosting More VMs per Server with Improved Performance

The value of persistent memory isn’t limited to databases. When you house your VMs in Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, you can host more VMs per server thanks to larger memory capacity and improve VM performance.

These are just two examples of how this technology can change the game. Now is the time to start planning for how this architecture can help you solve business problems.

Intel Optane DC Persistent + UCS Manager = Consistency & Accuracy

Cisco is different than other server vendors because of our management. Using UCS Manager, the configuration for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory will be validated and policies will be applied. This makes it easy to configure if the modules will be used as memory, in application direct mode, or in a combination of the two. You can even create server pools so that when a server with a specific configuration is discovered, your polices and profiles for Intel Xeon® Scalable processor-based servers with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory are automatically applied. Using polices and service profiles ensures consistency and accuracy for your server configurations, eliminating manual error-prone setup.

UCS servers with Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory are just another example of Cisco and Intel’s long-term partnership working to accelerate application performance for our customers.

Are you new to Cisco UCS or do you want to dig into the details of how UCS works? Or want to learn more about Intel Optane? Follow these links take a deeper look at these solutions.