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Cisco Introduces Rackmount Servers
1sockchuck writes "After shaking up the market for blade servers, Cisco Systems is launching a line of rackmount servers. But the company says its ambitions are more targeted than a full-scale 'all your racks are belong to us' assault on the volume server market. Cisco says it sees its 1U and 2U C-Series rackmount servers as offering an entry point to its Unified Computing System vision for companies who've built their data centers using rackmount servers instead of blades. But it thinks many customers will like the expanded memory capacity Cisco has built into the Xeon 5500/Nehalem EP processor."
When a company has over 30 billion dollars in liquid assets (Excel warning), entering a market that's closely related to the one it's currently in does not classify as ballsy, even if said market has competitors.
I think this is a great thing for Cisco. Okay, so nobody will buy their servers for regular stuff. But they will buy Call Manager servers and the like. At work we have 3 Cisco servers that are re-branded IBM boxes. One is for our Unity voicemail system and the other two are for Callmanager. When there are hardware issues, I need to call Cisco who then calls IBM to fix it. I think from a support perspective, it would be a huge benefit to actually MAKE the servers you are supporting that way support requests get processed more efficiently. Cisco doesn't just have IBM servers either, they have HP as well so that would be two vendors that they don't need to deal with anymore for support.
I work for Cisco, so this post is biased.
If you want to know more about Intel Nehalem 55xx architecture.
It explains that a the server manufacturer using the Intel Nehalem 55xx processor can support up to 3, 6 or 9 DIMMs/socket. This corresponds with a memory bus speed of 1333, 1066 or 800Mhz. The latter is not often implemented and would give you (9x2x8GB) 144GB in a dual socket system.
What Cisco did is, developing a patented "memory switch" which presents up to 4 DIMMs as 1 to the processor, MULTIPLYING THE ALLOWED RAM TIMES FOUR. If the memory is running at 1066Mhz this gives you 48DIMMs. If the memory is running at 800Mhz this would allow up to 72 DIMMs in one server. The latter one has not been implemented.
Where would you ever need this kind of memory?
* Running VMware ESX, XenServer,... and assuming 3-4GB per VM -> imagine 96 VMs per physical box
* imagine running a 300GB MySQL database out of RAM without the need of a high end machine
Also the price per GB is not linear for memory. 8GB costs currently way more than 4x 2GB. So if you still don't need the 384GB memory, you can fill the 48DIMMs with 2GB and have a 96GB RAM server for a lower price.
There are also a lot of other features which are really different and better than the competition, such as centralized management per 320 servers. In more enterprise environments customers can also consolidate their SAN and their LAN network by using open standard FCoE.
Please check it out at Cisco - Unified Computing System