Cisco Puts Its New UCS Data Center Solutions on Display

by Jeffrey Burt

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, spoke with journalists about a wide range of subjects, from security to microservers, but kept focused on the company’s idea of what officials call the “Fast IT” business model of helping organizations create highly agile, scalable, adaptable and automated IT environments in the age of big data, mobility, cloud computing and the Internet of things.

Cisco’s new UCS Mini is an all-in-one solution that comes in a small form factor that includes integrated 6248 Fabric Interconnects and is aimed at remote sites, branch offices and small IT environments, which can see a 36 percent advantage in TCO compared with traditional rack servers.

The new generation of systems includes both rack and blade servers, including the B200 M4 blade, pictured here.

The new UCS blade and rack systems, including this C220 M4 rack system, are powered by Intel’s upcoming Xeon E5-2600 v3 “Grantley” chips, which are built on the “Haswell” architecture.

While much of the focus on the UCS is about the new servers, including this C240 M4 rack system, Paul Perez, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Computing System Product Group, said that Cisco is “not in the server business. We’re in the computing business.”

Major League Baseball’s AM group, headquartered in New York City, streams live games, game stats and other information to fans that Joe Inzerillo, executive vice president and CTO, says have an “insatiable appetite for stats.” The data center pictured here is one of six the business operates nationwide, and one of two here.

MLB AM’s Transmission Operations Center is where the unit brings in and sends out the video and audio feeds from the games being played around the country. The bulk of the systems running in MLB AM’s data centers are UCS systems, according to Inzerillo.

Major League Baseball this year instituted a policy that all replay decisions will be made by umpires in MLB AM’s offices in New York. This is the room where the review umpires watch the games and, if necessary, make the final judgment on controversial plays.