Cisco innovations target the datacentre

Cisco's new offerings will see it competing more closely with IBM, Dell and HP

Cisco has launched new upgrades for its Data Centre 3.0 portfolio, claiming that organisations will be able to take advantage of improved business agility and better support for datacentres.

Chief among the announcements is the second generation of Cisco's Unified Computing System (UCS) range.

Wendy Mars, director for datacentre and virtualisation in Europe at Cisco, explained that the new features had been driven by demands from customers and partners.

"There is a need among companies to reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity in the datacentre, while also supporting virtualisation and improving agility for businesses," she said.

"These are critical areas for the enhancement of services, and we think that the upgrades to the UCS that we first introduced last year can deliver a significant strategic competitive advantage."

Cisco explained that the UCS portfolio had been upgraded with next-generation two-socket and four-socket servers that offer 50 per cent more processor cores, 300 per cent greater application performance and four times as much memory.

The company added that the upgrades will help accelerate virtualisation projects by delivering a higher performance computing architecture that brings together compute, network, storage access and virtualisation resources in a single system.