Advancing the concept of full virtualized data centers, Cisco (CSCO) released a set of enhancements and extensions to its “Data Center 3.0” line that will help service providers reduce the expense, management complexity, and power consumption of their IT plant.
Yesterday’s announcement represents the second generation of Cisco’s “Unified Computing System,” which promises to do for data centers what unified communications attempts to do for enterprise communications: using the power of virtualization to “deliver a high performance computing architecture uniting compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system,” the company said.
Among other things, the UCS additions will provide four times the standard memory capacity, 300 percent improvements in application performance (critical for operators selling advanced communications applications to their business customers), and half again as many processor cores.
The latest system will also provide four times the bandwidth capacity within the same physical footprint, with power consumption reductions of up to 10 percent.
Major carriers like AT&T (T) and BT Group (BT) are looking to high-performance, lower-cost data centers to push their business forward at a time when VoIP, softswitches and SIP are transforming enterprise communications.
