Cisco innovations target the datacentre

Cisco has launched new upgrades for its Data Centre 3.0 portfolio, claiming that organisations will be able to take advantage of improved business agility and better support for datacentres.

Chief among the announcements is the second generation of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) range.

Wendy Mars, director for datacentre and virtualisation in Europe at Cisco, explained that the new features had been driven by demands from customers and partners.

"There is a need among companies to reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity in the datacentre, while also supporting virtualisation and improving agility for businesses," she said.

"These are critical areas for the enhancement of services, and we think that the upgrades to the UCS that we first introduced last year can deliver a significant strategic competitive advantage."

Cisco explained that the UCS portfolio had been upgraded with next-generation two-socket and four-socket servers that offer 50 per cent more processor cores, 300 percent greater application performance and four times as much memory.

The company added that the upgrades will help accelerate virtualisation projects by delivering a higher performance computing architecture that brings together compute, network, storage access and virtualisation resources in a single system.

Cisco has also launched a new Fabric Extender link architecture for the Nexus and UCS ranges to offer support for 100Mb, 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet for the Nexus 5000 series and, later in the year, the 7000 series.

Kerry Partridge, networking services business manager at Cisco, added that the move will also offer 160Gbit/s bandwidth capabilities to blade chassis and 8Gbit/s on channel uplinks.

"As workloads become more memory hungry we have added Intel's 5600 and 7500 Xeon processors to the new blades and rack mounts to offer four times the bandwidth capability than was previously possible," he said.

As part of the expansion of its Nexus portfolio, Cisco also announced that the Nexus 2248 and Nexus 2232 fabric extenders will offer 10Gb Ethernet to the datacentre on fibre rather than just copper lines.

The company claimed that this could reduce cabling by up to 70 percent, power and cooling by up to 30 percent and capital expenses by up to 40 percent.

A new Cisco Virtualised Interface Card, meanwhile, offers up to 30 per cent greater application throughput for the firm's datacentre architecture, Cisco said.

The move represents another push by Cisco to compete with the likes of Dell, HP and IBM in the datacentre space.