Data, unstored,
the keywords for Cisco UCS S-Series Storage Servers.
The S-Series is designed for data intensive workloads such as big data, streaming media and collaboration applications, and for deploying software-defined storage, object storage, and data protection solutions.
The Cisco S-Series S3260, which is a follow-on from the C3260. Much of the
bare-bones specification remains, such as 600TB of local data storage with
enterprise-class redundancy, connectivity including NFS, iSCSI, Fibre Channel
(FC), FCoE, SMB and SMB Direct, scaling to petabytes with Cisco UCS Manager,
and a dual-node two-socket architecture using Intel Xeon CPUs. But much else
has changed, particularly the adoption of a modular design so that different
components can be refreshed at different times.
The S3260 is the
first product in the S-Series line-up and the main features are:
- Dual two-socket server nodes using an Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 or v4 CPU, with up to 36 cores per server node or 72 cores per system.
- Up to 512GB of DDR3 or DDR4 memory per server node (1TB total)
- Support for high-performance Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and flash memory
- 600TB data storage capacity that scales to petabytes with Cisco UCS Manager
- Policy-based storage management framework
- Dual-port 40Gbit/s system I/O controllers with UCS Virtual Interface Card (VIC) 1300 platform embedded chip
- Unified I/O for Ethernet or Fibre Channel to existing NAS or SAN storage environments
- Support for Cisco bi-directional (BIDI) transceivers, with 40Gbit/s connectivity over existing 10Gbit/s cabling infrastructure
This slide from
Cisco summarizes the modularity. One point is that Cisco's 40Gbit/s virtual
interface card (think VNIC) provides 256 virtual adapters per node plus
16Gbit/s native Fabre Channel options.
UCS S-Series Modular Design
Modular
components include disk, SSD and NVMe media (caching flash with Fusion
ioMemory3 PX), disk expanders, IO expanders, flash memory and Ethernet/FC/FCoE
connectivity options.
They can be
cache-optimized, capacity-optimized, compute-intensive and IO-intensive
configurations; the latter having 160GB/sec of aggregated VIC IO, and either 8
or 16Gbit/s FC.
Capacity can be scaled out, by adding nodes, to 86PB in a UCS
domain.
Compared to
Cisco's own traditional-style servers, we're told the UCS S3260:
- Reduces CapEx by 34 per cent
- Lowers ongoing management by 80 per cent
- Reduces cabling by 70 per cent
- Takes up 60 per cent less space
- Consumes 59 per cent less power
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