Building Right from the Start for Big Data with Cisco Unified Computing System

By Todd Brannon, Director of Product Marketing, Unified Computing

At the upper end of our UCS server portfolio we feature systems that deliver the large memory footprints and core-counts that performance-intensive workloads demand.  Today’s announcement of the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v3 Family brings powerful new capabilities to this class of system.

Why is this important?

Our customers are striving to become intelligence-driven throughout their operations in order to create a perpetual and renewable competitive edge. Taking a long-term view in choosing the right infrastructure is essential; here are two reasons why:

1. You never hear about a big data environment getting smaller.  Massive increases in data volume mean these environments will inevitably grow, and for many, this will mean continuously expanding clusters of hundreds or thousands of servers.
2. Data is the lifeblood of the digital enterprise.  As the use of big data becomes pervasive and critical to day-to-day decision-making, the performance and predictability of these computing platforms will become increasingly paramount to the success of the business.  Choose partners you can trust.

IT departments need an infrastructure that is designed for deployment and operation at scale.  Down at the server level, particularly for scale up workloads, they will always need more horsepower, and it can’t come with additional power and cooling load.  Cisco UCS and the new Intel Xeon processor E7 v3 family lineup deliver on both of these vectors.

Traditional servers, essentially designed as stand-alone devices, aren’t built with needs of these new big-data environments in mind.  This is where Cisco UCS and our Integrated Infrastructure for big data come in.  We’re bringing customers a platform optimized for long-term success because of its unified design, inherent scalability, advanced reliability and robust security.  By abstracting the identity and configuration of individual servers and managing exclusively through policy constructs, UCS allows IT teams to manage up to 10,000 servers as a single pool of resources.  Many in the industry are still focused on the issues of density and power, which most customers consider basic computing table stakes today.  UCS is designed to optimize the most important resource in the data center: people’s time.

Intel and Cisco have a special partnership because UCS gives customers the most operationally effective platform to harness the performance and efficiency Xeon delivers.  The new class of systems we’re releasing today can scale to 72 processors and 6TB memory footprint, ideal for the latest generation of in-memory database workloads as well as traditional ERP applications and databases. Cisco was the first server vendor to publish results on the new TPCx-HS benchmark and it’s our intention to continue to lead the industry in terms of performance for these workloads.

Disruption and opportunity will continue to accelerate the realm of analytics.  Cisco and Intel are partnering to build the platforms customers need to build for the long haul.  To stay up to date, please follow us on twitter at #CiscoUCS and #CiscoDC.