Cisco UCS C260 M2 server 300 GB Rack (3U) Intel® Xeon® E7 Family E7-2800 2.4 GHz 128 GB DDR3-SDRAM

Cisco UCS C-Series Rack-Mount Servers extend unified computing and standalone innovations to an industry-standard form factor to help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase business agility. Designed to operate both in standalone environments and as part of the Cisco Unified Computing System™, the Cisco UCS C-Series employs Cisco technology to help customers handle the most challenging workloads. The Cisco UCS C-Series incorporates many Cisco innovations such as standards-based unified network fabric; Cisco VN-Link virtualization support; Cisco Extended Memory Technology; and the capability to scale computing, I/O, disk, and memory resources independently. In addition, the Cisco UCS C-Series servers support an incremental deployment model and protect customer investments with a future migration path to unified computing.

The Cisco UCS C260 M2 Rack-Mount Server is one of the industry’s highest-density two-socket rack-server platforms and is a critical new building block in the Cisco Unified Computing System portfolio, offering compact performance for enterprise-critical applications within the Cisco UCS architecture and patented Cisco Extended Memory Technology (Figure 1). It is well suited for IT departments that are looking for ways to increase computing performance, memory capacity, and disk drive I/O operations per second (IOPS) while deriving optimal value from the available space in their data centers, and it allows customers to avoid or reduce the need for costly per-socket or per-core licensing fees. With the Cisco UCS C260 M2 rack-mount server, Cisco continues to extend data center technology in every dimension, including CPU enhancements for better performance; expandability; security; and reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features. The server also offers increased I/O performance, on-board storage capacity, and an exceptional memory footprint of up to 64 dual inline memory module (DIMM) slots in a two-rack-unit (2RU) form factor. In addition, the Cisco UCS C260 M2 is designed to increase performance and capacity for demanding virtualization and large-data-set workloads, service provider environments, enterprise data centers, and virtual desktop hosting. The system also helps improve throughput for large-data-set workloads, including database management systems and modeling and simulation applications.

Building on the success of the Cisco UCS C250 M2 Extended-Memory Rack-Mount Server, the Cisco UCS C260 M2 server extends the capabilities of the Cisco Unified Computing System with the next generation of Intel processor technology: the Intel Xeon processor E7-2800 product family. These powerful processors deliver more cores, threads, and cache, all within a similar power envelope, with even faster payback, greater productivity, and better energy efficiency than preceding models. When put into production, the Cisco Unified Computing System and Intel® Xeon® processor E7-2800 product family together offer further reductions in TCO, increased business agility, and another big leap forward in data center virtualization.

Applications
The Cisco UCS C260 M2 server is ideal for IT departments that are looking for ways to increase compute performance, memory capacity, internal storage or I/O capacity, while deriving maximum value from the available space in their data centers. This expandability allows customers to decrease costly licensing fees by increasing performance, without adding new cpu sockets. Applications that are memory-bound today will benefit from more than 1 terabyte (TB) of addressable memory that the Cisco UCS C260 M2 server offers.

With 64 DIMM slots available, the Cisco UCS C260 M2 server design is unique among two-socket servers based on Intel Xeon processor E7-2800 product family. From a memory-capacity perspective, it can alleviate memory bottlenecks in situations in which costly four-socket servers might otherwise be necessary, helping improve the price-to-performance ratio for running large-memory-footprint applications. From a memory-cost viewpoint, the server can be populated with low-cost 4- or 8-GB DIMMs for a total of up to 256 or 512 GB of main memory; this memory configuration delivers a memory footprint that other two-socket Intel Xeon processor E7-2800-based systems may require costly 32-GB DIMMS to achieve.

These benefits of Cisco Extended Memory Technology can be harnessed by customers when very large memory footprints are required or when large, low-cost memory footprints are desirable, as in the following examples:

- Large virtualized environments can host more or larger virtual machines with the server’s larger memory capacity, resulting in higher performance.
- Database applications can thrive in virtualized and non-virtualized environments, because the server uses a combination of a large memory footprint, 16 hard-disk drives (HDDs) or solid-state drives (SSDs), and the fastest Intel processors.
- Traditional high-performance-computing (HPC) applications can benefit from the server’s performance and 64 DIMM slots, including memory-intensive engineering design automation (EDA) and geophysical modeling applications. EDA applications and oil and seismic applications can now expand beyond the 256 GB memory capacity of other two-socket servers.
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications hosted on the Cisco UCS C260 M2 server can run with improved performance with large data sets in main memory.

Features and Benefits
The Cisco UCS C260 M2 server extends Cisco unified computing innovations - including Cisco Extended Memory Technology - to an industry-standard, rack-mount form factor. It is the first rack-mount server available anywhere with a built-in future migration path to unified computing. It increases customer choice by providing unique benefits in a rack-mount server, bringing differentiation and value to what has traditionally been a market with products not optimized to meet the needs of virtualized data centers.