“Cisco UCS Hot Summer” Announcements and Innovations

I asked my friend Robert Novak, another longtime UCS fan, about any news on Cisco UCS this year. There’s a lot of it. Check out his guest post below:

Thanks to Craig for letting me share some of the “Cisco UCS Hot Summer” announcements and innovations. The Unified Computing System’s 15th birthday was a couple of months ago, and we’re celebrating with new and innovative products.

We announced UCS X-Series Direct, and some colleagues and I showed it off in the Cisco Compute section of the World of Solutions, at Cisco Live US in Las Vegas a couple of months ago. X-Series Direct brings the UCS Fabric Interconnect inside the X-Series chassis, much like UCS Mini did ten years ago for the B-Series. This means that in a single 7RU enclosure, you have converged Ethernet and storage networking, unified management, and up to 16 sockets of the latest Intel and AMD processors with tons of memory, options for GPUs, and the future proofing you expect from Cisco blade and modular platforms.

We also had our newest C-Series and X-Series servers on display in several locations, featuring the newest in AMD EPYC processors. Our C225 single-socket and C245 dual-socket M8 rackmount servers, featuring AMD’s 4th generation AMD EPYC processors, add flexibility to customer datacenters, bringing the same unified management, Virtual Interface Card (VIC) options, and storage options that you’ve found in our Intel-based servers.

But the real big news on AMD at Cisco is our X215c M8 modular server for X-Series. The industry’s first and only 4th generation EPYC-based blade server, X215c M8 offers two 4th generation EPYC processors with up to 128 cores each, up to 6TB of RAM, 6 2.5” drives (up to 91.8TB of SAS SSD or NVMe) the UCS VIC options already seen in our Intel-based X-Series servers with 100 Gigabit end-to-end performance over Ethernet, NFS, and FCoE, and PCIe nodes with GPUs using Cisco’s X-Fabric technology. That’s up to 2048 cores, 48TB of RAM, and 734TB of storage in 7U of rackspace.

The best part? Everything I mentioned here is available to order today. The C245 M8 2U server is shipping today. X-Direct, X215c M8, and C225 M8 are shipping in time for your holiday server-giving.

And possibly even better? The AMD servers are ready for the 5th generation AMD EPYC processors announced in June (during Cisco Live), with just a UCS firmware update required to take advantage of the new processors when they ship from AMD later this year.

Watch the upcoming Cisco Live events for more innovations from Cisco Compute. We’re in Melbourne November 11-14, Amsterdam in February 2025, and the US event is in San Diego next June. We’re gearing up for the newest processors and storage technology, and then some.

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Robert Novak is currently a product manager in Cisco UCS networking, continuing over a decade as a productive UCS fanboy. He was the first rackmount UCS Manager customer in his last production sysadmin job, moving on to over six years as a technical solutions architect for UCS and Big Data at Cisco, returning after a couple of years away to drive the future of the Virtual Interface Card. He blogs at rsts11.com, and his hat can be found on X at @CiscoBigDataHat.

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X-Series Direct: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-x-series-modular-system/ucs-x-series-direct-ds.html
C225 M8: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/ucs-c225-m8-rack-server-ds.html
C245 M8: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-c-series-rack-servers/ucs-c245-m8-rack-server-ds.html
X215c M8: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-x-series-modular-system/ucs-x215c-m8-compute-node-aag.html