Today Cisco expanded on its popular Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) with the introduction of its M5 generation. M5 will extend Cisco’s total-system approach to computing. The newest generation of UCS will continue to build on the company’s vision to deliver pervasive simplicity, uncompromised application performance, and strategic, future-proof IT.
Today Cisco expanded on its popular Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) with the introduction of its M5 generation. M5 will extend Cisco’s total-system approach to computing. The newest generation of UCS will continue to build on the company’s vision to deliver pervasive simplicity, uncompromised application performance, and strategic, future-proof IT.
Cisco has taken its unique approach to computing, UCS, and expanded and built on it with this new M5 generation. According to the company, the new design can reduce administration and management costs by up to 63% and accelerate the delivery of new application services by up to 83%. On top of that, M5 will help address some issues that help companies become more competitive including real-time analytics, faster decision-making, and more sustainable solutions. The new M5 lineup delivers the performance needed for new applications while also giving IT the simplicity they need.
The M5 generation of servers include:
- Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server: a fundamental data center workhorse in a half-width blade form factor, the B200 delivers performance, versatility and density for traditional multi-tier or distributed applications. It leads the industry in GPU density on general-purpose half-width blade servers with support for up to two GPUs.
- Cisco UCS B480 M5 Blade Server: delivers market- leading performance, versatility and density for workloads ranging from memory-intensive, mission-critical enterprise applications to distributed database virtualized workloads.
- Cisco UCS C220 M5 Rack Server: among the most versatile general-purpose enterprise infrastructure and application servers in the industry, this high-density 2- socket rack server delivers industry-leading performance and efficiency for a wide range of workloads, including virtualization, collaboration, and bare-metal applications.
- Cisco UCS C240 M5 Rack Server: a storage and I/O optimized enterprise-class rack server for big data analytics, software-defined storage and bare metal applications.
- Cisco UCS C480 M5 Rack Server: featuring an innovative modular architecture for flexible technology refreshes, the C480 delivers scale-up extensibility for in-memory databases, big data analytics, virtualization, VDI and bare metal applications. GPU support has tripled—with up to six supported—as has disk capacity, which now supports 32 drives.
- UCS Director 6.5 automated workflow schedule management, enhancements to the workflow designer, and heatmapping. Automation improvements include infrastructure deployment for FlexPod, enhanced automation for Cisco HyperFlex, and added support for the UCS M5 series and UCS S-Series servers.
- Workload Optimization Manager combines machine learning with advanced analytics to provide insight to reduce costs, increase utilization and ensure SLAs. It is a self-managing solution that helps ensure application performance by optimizing the configuration, capacity, and placement of infrastructure resources.
This new lineup will feature Intel’s new Xeon Scalable processors as well as double the memory of the previous UCS lineup. Cisco stated that in their lab, they were able to be a performance increase of 86% over the previous version, making this a large step forward for businesses running data intensive workloads such as real-time analytics and in-memory computing. Along with the new Intel CPUs, higher memory, and better performance, the UCS M5 will come with the “highest GPU density in the industry,” making it an attractive choice in VDI.
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