Cisco has announced additions to its Data Center 3.0 portfolio, designed to reduce IT infrastructure cost and complexity, provide better support for data center virtualization.

Second-generation Cisco Unified Computing System, is designed for improved virtualization, delivering a high performance computing architecture uniting compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources in a single energy-efficient system.

The next generation two-socket and four-socket server additions to the Unified Computing System portfolio offer up to 50 percent more processor cores, 300 percent greater application performance, and four times the standard memory footprint. The company also expanded the Cisco Nexus portfolio with the Nexus 2248 and Nexus 2232 fabric extenders, improving capacity with 10-Gigabit Ethernet to the data center.

Cisco has also expanded the Cisco Developer Network to include support for companies that are developing to the UCS Manager XML API (Application Programming Interface). Developers now have access to online self-help tools, training videos, sample code, developer community forums, and Unified Computing System labs for development and testing.

Cisco is also working closely with systems management vendors such as BMC, CA, HP, Microsoft and VMware to provide integrated solutions with Cisco UCS Manager.

The new servers M2 B-Series and C-Series two-socket servers are based on the new Intel Xeon 5600 Processor Series. Whereas B-Series and C-Series four-socket servers are based on Intel Xeon 7500 Processor Series.

The new Cisco FEX-link architecture, incorporated into both Cisco Nexus and Cisco Unified Computing System Fabric Extenders, provides an open, flexible server access layer that now supports any fabric, with 100Mb, 1Gb and 10Gb Ethernet, native Fibre Channel as well as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE.), InfiniBand over Ethernet, iSCSI and NAS. Cisco FEX-link is currently supported on the Cisco Unified Computing System and Cisco Nexus 5000 Series, with availability soon on the Nexus 7000 Series switches. In addition, FEX-link architecture will enable the Cisco Unified Computing System to offer up to 160Gb of bandwidth per blade in the coming year.

The new Cisco MDS 9148 Multilayer Fabric Switch is optimized for space and power, with 48 8Gb Fibre Channel ports per rack unit. New 8Gb Fibre Channel uplinks for server access have also been added to the Nexus 5000 Series and UCS 6100 Series interconnects.

Cisco is also introducing an updated portfolio of Virtualization Services to help companies successfully adopt and integrate Cisco data center solutions, including the Cisco Unified Computing System.

"Cisco is committed to delivering architectural innovation and value to our customers, while also expanding the breadth and depth of our partner ecosystem," said Soni Jiandani, vice president, Cisco Server Access and Virtualization Technology Group. "Cisco Unified Computing System innovations, such as memory expansion and the Virtualized Network Interface Card, combined with the power of the Intel Xeon 5600 Processor Series, have made Cisco Unified Computing System the leading platform for running the most important business applications."