Prospects Reward the Stunning Longevity and Adaptability of Cisco UCS

Once we launched our first compute platform in 2009 with Cisco UCS B-Sequence Blade Servers, there was a good quantity of snickering from {industry} watchers and established server distributors. Most didn’t anticipate us to final within the compute marketplace for various years.

Not solely are we nonetheless within the server enterprise 15 years later, however the UCS B-Sequence continues to be a extensively used, totally supported platform that continues to pay dividends for many who took the leap all these years in the past.

As many will attest, this isn’t the norm. Whether or not it’s due to shorter assist home windows, frequent modifications to chassis designs, or an incapability to accommodate evolving energy, cooling, and processing necessities, most server platforms have to be changed each handful of years.

That was too disruptive and expensive for Nathan Bullock, IT Operations Supervisor at Interstates, a development {industry} chief based mostly in Iowa. Bullock mentioned the corporate was being pressured into chassis replacements or main upgrades involving midplanes and backplanes simply to leverage the newer blades.

Bored with the fixed refresh cycle, Interstates deployed UCS X-Sequence, the successor to UCS B-Sequence that improves on the seminal platform in each means and was designed to final simply as lengthy—if not longer.

“I feel Cisco UCS X-Sequence is the primary platform that actually delivers on the promise of next-gen computing, the place you possibly can improve on the fly and regularly tailor the setting to fulfill the wants of the enterprise,” Bullock mentioned. “And the longevity of the platform has actually hit residence with our finance, procurement, and government groups.”

Designing for the long run

So, how did we create a server platform that lasts properly over a decade when the industry-standard is 5–10 years?

In the beginning, we leveraged our unparalleled networking experience and utilized it towards server innovation. We created a unified material that simplifies the connectivity between server, storage, and networking techniques. Extra importantly, it eliminates the necessity for a hard and fast information airplane contained in the chassis, which represents the one most limiting consider different server platforms.

Applied sciences change and evolve. The much less you hardwire into the chassis, the extra flexibility and longevity the chassis will present.

Due to our groundbreaking unified material, UCS B-Sequence was capable of seamlessly evolve from 10G to 40G utilizing industry-standard connectors whereas different server platforms reached the ability, cooling, and processing limitations of their mounted information airplane. UCS X-Sequence offers an equally spectacular improve path, able to assist the 10G/25G/40G/100G wants of in the present day and 400G/800G wants of tomorrow.

“Our infrastructure is future proof,” mentioned Rod Lucero, CTO of Xigent, an IT companies chief that just lately deployed the platform to assist its new full-stack observability (FSO) choices. “With UCS X-Sequence, we’ve a 100G spine that may simply transfer to 400G and past. It offers us 14 years of runway and a ton of flexibility.”

That flexibility extends properly past connectivity and community velocity. UCS X-Sequence is totally modular, which means totally different elements—like CPUs, GPUs, and reminiscence—might be combined, matched, and swapped over time.

“A few of our workloads are extra reminiscence intensive than CPU intensive,” Bullock mentioned of Interstates’ software portfolio. “With this new platform, we are able to tune every field for our particular wants as an alternative of regularly overprovisioning or shopping for new ones.”

And so they can adapt or improve these packing containers as wanted over an prolonged time period.

For Xigent, the modularity of UCS X-Sequence has opened new service potentialities involving synthetic intelligence/machine studying (AI/ML), high-performance computing (HPC), digital desktop infrastructure (VDI), and GPU-enabled workloads. And the simplicity of our cutting-edge administration platform, Cisco Intersight, has supercharged their inside operations.

“We will see and orchestrate all the compute, storage, and networking techniques in our information facilities with Cisco Intersight, and it’s really easy to maneuver issues round,” Lucero mentioned. “We will take extra capability from one information heart, transfer it to the opposite, and make it out there to a buyer inside a day if they’ve an pressing want—all from a single console.”

As you take into account your subsequent server refresh or improve, make sure to look again in addition to ahead. There’s just one platform that may reliably serve your wants till 2040—and probably past.

 

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