Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled on Monday its long-awaited Unified Computing System architecture, which unites compute, network, storage access and virtualization resources in a single energy efficient system. UCS will be generally available to customers starting in the second quarter of 2009.
Today's announcement extends Cisco's data center portfolio and is another step in the company's Data Center 3.0 strategy. The company began working on this architecture three years ago with deliverables throughout 2008, including the release of a data center networking platform (Nexus 7000), a unified fabric (Nexus 5000), a virtual network line (Nexus 1000v) and a fabric extender (Nexus 2000).
Prem Jain, senior vice president of Cisco’s Server Access Virtualization Business Unit, explained in a customer Webcast Monday that the UCS addresses key data center challenges. Physically, it allows companies to wire once and consolidate switches, adapters and cables. Virtually, it allows businesses to manage virtual resources the same as physical ones. And, finally, it allows it to scale without increasing management points.
UCS is the first in a new family of products. On the computing side, there are the Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the future Intel Nehalem processor families (the next generation Intel Xeon processor). The Cisco blades offer patented extended memory technology to support applications with large data sets and allow more Virtual Machines per server. On the network side, UCS supports a unified fabric consolidates what today are three separate networks: LANs, SANs and high-performance computing networks. On the virtualization side, UCS extends Cisco security, policy enforcement, and diagnostics features to virtualized environments. On the storage side, UCS consolidates SANs and NAS.
In addition, the entire solution is managed as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager.
Jaim said aside from the core unification objectives of UCS, the other key deliverables are embedded management and energy efficiency. “We decided from day one we want to manage it from a single point,” he said. In addition, UCS allows for businesses to dynamically move resources around as their needs change. He said the system meets the Energy Star 4 rating, has lower cooling and power requirements and removes memory and I/O bottlenecks.
Gary Moore, Cisco’s senior vice president of Advanced Services, said a paid customer deployment of UCS in a legacy data center resulted in capex reductions of 45 percent and payback of just over one year.
Cisco also announced a suite of Unified Computing services ranging from architecture design, planning and migration to operations and remote management.
In addition, Cisco announced it is collaborating with an open ecosystem of partners to support technology innovation, augment service delivery and accelerate market adoption. Cisco has formed collaborative and development relationships with BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat and VMware. Cisco also is expanding its strategic relationships with key business consulting and global systems integration partners such as Accenture, CSC, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro.
In addition, there are 250 channel partners working in the data center program.
