When we launched our first compute platform in 2009 with Cisco UCS B-Series 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 quite a lot of years.
Not solely are we nonetheless within the server enterprise 15 years later, however the UCS B-Series remains to be a broadly used, totally 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 it’s due to shorter assist home windows, frequent adjustments to chassis designs, or an incapacity to accommodate evolving energy, cooling, and processing necessities, most server platforms should be changed each handful of years.
That was too disruptive and expensive for Nathan Bullock, IT Operations Manager 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.
Tired of the fixed refresh cycle, Interstates deployed UCS X-Series, the successor to UCS B-Series that improves on the seminal platform in each approach and was designed to final simply as lengthy—if not longer.
“I think Cisco UCS X-Series is the first platform that truly delivers on the promise of next-gen computing, where you can upgrade on the fly and continually tailor the environment to meet the needs of the business,” Bullock stated. “And the longevity of the platform has really hit home with our finance, procurement, and executive teams.”
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?
First and foremost, 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 programs. More importantly, it eliminates the necessity for a set knowledge airplane contained in the chassis, which represents the one most limiting think about different server platforms.
Technologies change and evolve. The much less you hardwire into the chassis, the extra flexibility and longevity the chassis will present.
Because of our groundbreaking unified material, UCS B-Series was capable of seamlessly evolve from 10G to 40G utilizing industry-standard connectors whereas different server platforms reached the facility, cooling, and processing limitations of their mounted knowledge airplane. UCS X-Series supplies an equally spectacular improve path, able to assist the 10G/25G/40G/100G wants of immediately and 400G/800G wants of tomorrow.
“Our infrastructure is future proof,” stated Rod Lucero, CTO of Xigent, an IT companies chief that not too long ago deployed the platform to assist its new full-stack observability (FSO) choices. “With UCS X-Series, we have a 100G backbone that can easily move to 400G and beyond. It gives us 14 years of runway and a ton of flexibility.”
That flexibility extends properly past connectivity and community pace. UCS X-Series is totally modular, that means completely different elements—like CPUs, GPUs, and reminiscence—will be combined, matched, and swapped over time.
“Some of our workloads are more memory intensive than CPU intensive,” Bullock stated of Interstates’ software portfolio. “With this new platform, we can tune each box for our specific needs instead of constantly overprovisioning or buying new ones.”
And they will adapt or improve these bins as wanted over an prolonged time period.
For Xigent, the modularity of UCS X-Series 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 inside operations.
“We can see and orchestrate all of the compute, storage, and networking systems in our data centers with Cisco Intersight, and it’s so easy to move things around,” Lucero stated. “We can take excess capacity from one data center, move it to the other, and make it available to a customer within a day if they have an urgent need—all from a single console.”
As you think about your subsequent server refresh or improve, make sure you look again in addition to ahead. There’s just one platform that can reliably serve your wants till 2040—and probably past.
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