Cisco launches new servers, switches, and SANs to sweep through the data center
The company is looking to broaden its IT infrastructure portfolio and compete with IBM, HP, and Dell with the new products
Cisco rolled out this week a bevy of data center products ranging from servers to switches to SANs, all designed to further broaden the company's reach beyond networking and into IT infrastructure.
Cisco's new offerings include blade and rack servers incorporating Intel's Xeon 7500 processor, and supporting the company's FEXlink switching fabric extension architecture. Cisco also unveiled two new Nexus fabric extenders supporting speeds above and below Gigabit Ethernet, an 8Gbps fixed configuration MDS Fibre Channel SAN switch, and an appliance for provisioning services to virtual machines.
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Slideshow: Cisco's data center deluge | A test of Cisco's Nexus 5000 data center switch
The sum of the parts indicates Cisco's intention to play in virtually every facet of data center IT -- not just the network and not just virtualization, analysts say.
"The targeting is the big news," says Jonathan Eunice of Illuminata. "Cisco got into the server business with very narrow targeting: [CEO John] Chambers said, we're not really after the server business, we're after the virtualization business. This announcement changes that. [Cisco is] going after any workload, virtual or non-virtual. The specificity is gone."
This means Cisco will compete more directly with data center server incumbents IBM, HP, and Dell. But the company is still looking to differentiate itself by targeting "high-value" sales of server complexes instead of single, standalone servers, Eunice says, and Cisco is still stressing overall data center consolidation, virtualization, and automation.
"Even though they're relaxing their targeting, they're still very much going for the high-value workload, and they're going for the infrastructure-by-the-ton (sale)," Eunice says. "They don't want to sell you one; they want to sell in volume for a very standardized kind of infrastructure."
In that vein, Cisco rolled out two new UCS blade and rack servers: the B440 M1 and the C460 M1. Both are based on Intel's Xeon 7500 processor, and both -- like the other switching and storage access components of UCS now do -- support Cisco's FEXlink architecture for increased performance, bandwidth, and access to other resources in the data center.
FEXlink extends the switching fabric of a data center -- the mesh of bandwidth configured from multiple core, end of row, and top of rack switches -- closer to the servers and server racks themselves. This results in a four-fold increase in server bandwidth, or 160Gbps per blade, Cisco says. It also allows the blades to harness 8Gbps uplinks to Fibre Channel switches, increasing bandwidth to storage resources by 50 percent, and support more virtual interfaces per NIC, the company says.
This, combined with the new processors, allow the B440 M1 and C460 M1 to support a fourfold increase in compute capacity, making UCS a more general-purpose data center physical workload workhorse, not just one optimized for virtual workloads, analysts say.
