In this regard, Cisco has incorporated the new Intel Xeon E7 multi-core processors into its Unified Computing System (UCS) platform, significantly increasing the capacity of IT departments to process critical business applications while optimizing management and reducing energy consumption.
Based on 32nm technology, the Intel Xeon E7-8800/4800/2800 processors include up to 10 processing cores and Hyper-Threading technology, offering performance improvements of up to 40% compared to the Intel Xeon 7500, in addition to optimizing virtualization by 25% and reducing operating costs by up to 95%.
These improvements are even more significant in Cisco's case. In production environments, UCS servers equipped with Intel Xeon E7 processors have achieved a 70% optimization of application processing in virtual environments, while energy consumption has improved by 25% and database transactions have accelerated by 40%.
“By leveraging the power of Intel's new processors, UCS servers are responding to the increased processing demands generated by virtualization and cloud computing,” highlights Alfonso de Andrés, Channel Director at Cisco Spain. “Furthermore, data centers must significantly reduce their energy consumption, eliminate redundancies, and simplify their management.”
According to IDC data, nearly 80% of companies' technology budgets are allocated to maintaining complex and disconnected data centers. To reverse this trend, Cisco and its partners presented a completely innovative proposal almost two years ago: interconnecting dispersed components to create unified structures.
As an industry-leading platform, Cisco UCS is able to unify servers, networking, storage access, virtualization, and all management into a single standard, modular system that minimizes complexity and increases agility.
But also, by integrating all these components, applying integrated management and combining a single fabric and cabling system, “Cisco UCS manages to reduce total data center costs by up to 68%, greatly minimizing the resources dedicated to administration tasks and helping businesses focus on innovation,” continues the Cisco representative.
Energy Efficiency
Another advantage of the new Intel Xeon E7 processor family is its greater energy efficiency. Thanks to Intel Intelligent Power technology, which dynamically reduces power consumption in inactive areas of the chip, Xeon E7 processors offer 25% higher performance per watt.
For its part, the UCS platform further reduces energy consumption. As a converged system that uses half the components, reduces cabling, and integrates network access and storage through a unified fabric, UCS improves data center energy efficiency by up to 30%.
On the same day that Intel announced the availability of the new processors—April 5th—Cisco achieved nine world performance records processing mission-critical enterprise applications with the new Xeon processors, “placing itself ahead of other traditional server manufacturers such as HP, IBM, Dell, and SGI,” De Andrés emphasizes.
Records have been achieved with two- and four-socket UCS models, most notably the new two-socket UCS C260 M2 rackmount device, ideal for resource-intensive applications, which supports up to 10 processing cores per socket and 1 TB of dedicated memory via Cisco Extended Memory technology.
As an open platform, Cisco UCS relies on a comprehensive ecosystem of technology and channel partners. In the former case, more than 40 partners and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)—such as Citrix, Microsoft, EMC, NetApp, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, and VMware—have already designed more than 10,000 applications supported by UCS through the system's Application Programming Interface (API).
