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Cisco has expanded its data centre portfolio this week with servers and networking gear to better support virtualisation, cloud computing and Big Data.

Cisco says the rollout represents its third generation fabric computing platform and addresses data centre scale and promptness in responding to changing business needs.

As expected, the new servers in Ciscos Unified Computing System (UCS) fabric computing platform support Intels new Xeon processor E5-2600 line, also known as "Romley" and "Sandy Bridge", and includes multiple form factors, up to eight times the memory capacity and four times the I/O of previous UCS servers.

The UCS Manager now supports Ciscos UCS rack-mount servers, enabling those form factors to reach management parity with the UCS blade servers. Cisco also added fabric extenders, interconnects and I/O modules to support the new servers.

The new servers include one blade and two rack-mount units, all based on the Intel Xeon E5-2600 processor. The Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server comes in a half-blade form factor supporting 24 DIMM slots and up to 80 gigabits of I/O bandwidth.

The UCS C220 M3 Rack Server is a one rack unit (1RU) unit, targeted at business workloads like web services to distributed databases. The UCS C240 M3 Rack Server is a 2RU server designed for storage-intensive workloads, from big data to collaboration.

The new rack mount servers and Ciscos existing rack-mount units can now be managed by Cisco UCS Manager. UCS blade and rack-mount servers can be managed uniformly within a single domain by UCS Manager, Cisco says.

In the second half of 2012, Cisco says it will deliver the capability for UCS Manager to control multiple UCS domains, which would improve scale. The centralised manager will be able to govern and orchestrate thousands of servers in or between global data centres, Cisco says.

Naturally, the network has to support these increasingly virtualised and distributed workloads. So Cisco rolled out the chassis I/O module 2204XP. It offers 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each chassis to handle workload bursts. The module also offers load balancing across all ports.

Supporting it is the VIC 1240 interface card, which connects the server to the chassis I/O module and delivers the 80G to the server.

Read more from the original source:

Cisco rolls out UCS servers with Intel Xeon E5 chips