Cisco launches new servers, cloud suite, new data centre

Cisco said in its press statement that the new UCS S-Series is a new storage-optimised server category in the Cisco Unified Computing System (USC) portfolio.
The UCS S- Series can handle the rapid growth of unstructured data created by the Internet of Things, video, mobility, collaboration and analytics so that businesses can access and analyze data quickly to generate insights in real time, the statement said.
“IDC sees a dramatic shift in how new technologies are being applied to solve business problems and drive strategic growth in this, the 3rd platform era,” Matt Eastwood, SVP, Enterprise Infrastructure and Datacenter, IDC, was quoted in the statement. 
“Organizations are transforming themselves digitally and as they do so they are stressing the need to bring their compute and data resources closer together. Next gen applications including big data analytics remain top IT objectives and as data becomes increasingly strategic, core storage infrastructure is being redefined in software as a server workload.”
Cisco said the UCS S3260 Storage Server, the first in the UCS S-series, delivers the versatility, rapid scalability and cloud connectivity customers need to transform their data into business intelligence and insights.
With the first fully modular architecture in the industry and the automation of UCS Manager, the S3260 lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) by over 50 percent compared to public cloud, with the ability to right-size infrastructure to efficiently power every workload, Cisco added.
The UCS S3260 provides a wide range of capacity and performance options with up to 600 Terabytes of storage capacity per system, frictionless scaling up to Petabytes with UCS Manager, cache acceleration, and unified I/O connectivity for any type of data storage. With these capabilities, organizations can move from inactive data in warehouses and clouds to dynamic applications on a cloud-scale platform with high-speed processing to activate, analyze and act on data in real time.
 “We store millions of voice records for our end users every month,” said Brian Humphreys, Vice President of Infrastructure Delivery at Xerox. “The UCS S-Series provides us a more cost-effective means of offering them this service with second-tier storage. UCS management provides us with even greater efficiencies for running our operations worldwide.”
 “Just as Cisco utilized its networking expertise to build a server that is tightly integrated with the network and virtualization layers, Cisco is now applying its expertise to storage,” said Eric Hester, co-founder and CTO, GreenCloud.
“We know UCS is reliable, we can use the same Cisco® management tools we already use, and with the Cisco storage-optimized server we improved density by 25 percent over a white-box solution.”
“Fast storage is essential for instant recovery, which makes Cisco UCS® S-Series the key to making it work,” said Dan Timko, President & CTO, Cirrity. “We couldn’t have developed our vStream™ Vault without Cisco.”    
“Enterprise storage is moving from traditional, dedicated platforms to commodity hardware; but not all commodity hardware is created equal,” said Steven Hill, senior storage analyst with 451 Research. “Cisco’s new UCS S-Series offers substantial drive density and scalable x86 hardware options, making it easily customizable for any number of optimized SDS applications. Added to this is the S-Series’ deep integration with Cisco’s UCS management and datacenter automation platforms, not to mention Cisco’s world-wide support and service capabilities.”
Cisco also announced the next generation of its ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite, a hybrid cloud software solution that offers freedom of choice for application teams and delivers a self-service portal that can be tailored for end users, application developers and IT professionals.
Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite now delivers hybrid cloud for automation across the entire IT organization and user base. With this solution teams can deploy to over 20 different data center, private and public cloud environments. In addition, new annual subscription licenses in one, three, and five-year options enable customers to choose the right automation plan at the most cost-effective price point, the statement said.
The ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite has four offers, which can be used singly or in any combination.
Infrastructure Automation: Speeds time to market through consistent and faster delivery of error-free infrastructure environments to business and application teams.  Service Management: Empowers customers with self-service order and service management through a simple, intuitive user interface
Cloud Management: Enables faster time to market while reducing development costs by modeling application profiles once and deploying to multiple hybrid environments
Big Data Automation: Drives consistency with one-click installation, provisioning and deployment of Hadoop and Splunk clusters.  Reduces risk with near real-time diagnostics and historical analysis.
Cisco also announced the ASAP data center as part of its strategy to enable customers to Analyze, Simplify, Automate, and Protect their data and applications.
To support Cisco customers and partners in their automation journey with UCS Director, Cisco DevNet has revamped the UCS Developer Center to make it easier for developers to leverage the UCS Manager and UCS Director APIs for DevOps automation.  Enhancements include new self-paced learning labs with personalized learning tracks for Infrastructure and Application Developers, the statement added.
Cisco said its Open Pay from Cisco Capital provides a flexible way to acquire Cisco Unified Computing System solutions and select converged infrastructure storage solutions to meet both demand spikes. By paying for variable capacity as it is needed, customers can better align future payments to actual usage.