Cisco Unified Computing System Express

Overall this is a great setup if scale isn’t going to happen. Be great for a development or testing environment.

The New Cisco UCS-E is a nice solution for up to 4 blade servers, layer three routing, and layer 2 switching all on one box. If I was running a small office or project and needed a datacenter for cheap and in little space the UCS-E would work.

The blade servers are not powerful as B-Series blades found in UCS 5108 Chassis. This system is optimized for virtualization and would run enough VM’s to keep and office or project going regardless.

With the layer 3 and switch modules the UCS-E can literally be a “Little UCS” and more with layer 3 routing added.

Have concerns about scalability. Most systems either never get used, are re-purposed, or grow to need greater scaling. What happens when a “Little UCS” is out grown server blade or port wise? Guess the ESX or Hyper-V virtualization cluster could span multiple UCS-E chassis.

Cisco Unified Computing System Express

Craig