After we launched our first compute platform in 2009 with Cisco UCS B-Collection Blade Servers, there was a good quantity of snickering from {industry} watchers and established server distributors. Most didn’t count on 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-Collection continues to be a extensively used, absolutely supported platform that continues to pay dividends for individuals 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 help home windows, frequent modifications to chassis designs, or an lack of ability to accommodate evolving energy, cooling, and processing necessities, most server platforms should be changed each handful of years.
That was too disruptive and dear for Nathan Bullock, IT Operations Supervisor at Interstates, a building {industry} chief primarily based in Iowa. Bullock stated the corporate was being pressured into chassis replacements or main upgrades involving midplanes and backplanes simply to leverage the newer blades.
Uninterested in the fixed refresh cycle, Interstates deployed UCS X-Collection, the successor to UCS B-Collection that improves on the seminal platform in each approach and was designed to final simply as lengthy—if not longer.
“I feel Cisco UCS X-Collection is the primary platform that actually delivers on the promise of next-gen computing, the place you’ll be able to improve on the fly and regularly tailor the surroundings to fulfill the wants of the enterprise,” Bullock stated. “And the longevity of the platform has actually hit residence with our finance, procurement, and govt groups.”
Designing for the long run
So, how did we create a server platform that lasts nicely over a decade when the industry-standard is 5–10 years?
Firstly, we leveraged our unparalleled networking experience and utilized it towards server innovation. We created a unified cloth that simplifies the connectivity between server, storage, and networking programs. 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 cloth, UCS B-Collection was in a position to seamlessly evolve from 10G to 40G utilizing industry-standard connectors whereas different server platforms reached the facility, cooling, and processing limitations of their fastened information airplane. UCS X-Collection supplies an equally spectacular improve path, able to help the 10G/25G/40G/100G wants of at present and 400G/800G wants of tomorrow.
“Our infrastructure is future proof,” stated Rod Lucero, CTO of Xigent, an IT companies chief that lately deployed the platform to help its new full-stack observability (FSO) choices. “With UCS X-Collection, we have now 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 nicely past connectivity and community velocity. UCS X-Collection is absolutely modular, which means completely different elements—like CPUs, GPUs, and reminiscence—may be blended, matched, and swapped over time.
“A few of our workloads are extra reminiscence intensive than CPU intensive,” Bullock stated of Interstates’ utility portfolio. “With this new platform, we will tune every field for our particular wants as a substitute of continually overprovisioning or shopping for new ones.”
And so they can adapt or improve these containers as wanted over an prolonged time frame.
For Xigent, the modularity of UCS X-Collection has opened new service prospects 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 inner operations.
“We are able to see and orchestrate all the compute, storage, and networking programs in our information facilities with Cisco Intersight, and it’s really easy to maneuver issues round,” Lucero stated. “We are able to 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, you should definitely look again in addition to ahead. There’s just one platform that can reliably serve your wants till 2040—and presumably past.
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