Cisco Upgrades UCS Blades With Xeon 7500
Cisco is building Intel’s Xeon 7500 chips into its servers in a major revamp of UCS, the converged data centre strategy it launched a year ago.
The impact on other vendors of Cisco’s strong move in the data centre can be seen mostly in HP’s response. Once close partners, HP has been aggressively creating its own converged data center story, including ramping up the capabilities of its ProCurve networking business through internal innovation and the impending acquisition of 3Com.
Cisco in February also announced it was not renewing channel and systems integrator agreements with HP.
With the new offerings, that competition will only increase. Cisco officials are unveiling a host of upgraded blade and rack servers for its UCS, and also are rolling out two new systems powered by Intel’s new four- to eight-core Xeon 7500 “Nehalem EX” chips, which are progressing at the expense of RISC chips, including those of Intel itself.
Cisco servers have fabric extending FEXlink
A key feature to the new B440 M1 and C460 M1 servers is not only do they sport the latest Intel technology, but they also support Cisco’s FEXlink I/O architecture, which is designed to offer better performance and bandwidth. It also means better access to other data center resources.
FEXlink— or fabric extender — brings the switching fabric of a data centre closer to the systems, which Cisco says means 160 Gbps for each server blade, four times greater than traditional systems. Some storage and switching components of the UCS already support FEXlink, according to Cisco.
“There’s huge bandwidth per blade, without a chassis change,” Paul Durzan, director of platform marketing for Cisco, said in an interview.
It also works with storage resources by enabling the systems to offer support for 8G-bps Fibre Channel switches, improving storage bandwidth and virtualization capabilities.
“We’re [enabling] it to be used for any workload, whether it’s physical or virtual,” Durzan said.
The new servers and FEXlink support mean that the two new Cisco systems offer four times the compute capacity of previous systems. The B440 M1 and C460 M1 will be available in the summer, according to Cisco.
Cisco also is outfitting other rack and blade systems with Intel’s new six-core Xeon 5600 “Westmere EP” processors, a 32-nanometer platform the chip maker introduced in March.
In addition to the new and upgraded UCS blades, Cisco also is offering two new Nexus 2000 fabric extenders—the Nexus 2232, which supports 32 10G-bps Ethernet ports and enables FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) capabilities in the Nexus 5000 to the server racks, and the 2248 48-port 10/100M-bps Ethernet extender.
Cisco also rolled out the MDS 9148 SAN (storage area network) switch that supports 48 8G-bps Fibre Channel ports.
In addition, Cisco is offering the Nexus 1010, which officials called a virtual switching service for provisioning virtual machines. The goal, they said, is to make it easier for IT administrator to provision and manage their virtual environments by hosting such virtual services as Cisco’s Nexus 1000V virtual switch.
Cisco has also upgraded it UCS Manager software, integrating it with the major provisioning tools from such vendors as BMC Software, CA, EMC, IBM and HP.
