Quite a few months late on the announcement, but thought I’d put together a quick note that Cisco have released the first of the the M4 generation of C-series (rack mount) and B-series (blade) servers from their Unified Computing System.
A lot of the usual — new CPUs, more memories etc. Besides all that, there are a couple of notables in the release, though, that stood out for me.
1. The Physical Design
The new systems are, to put it bluntly, really, really, really ridiculously good looking. The black accents, metal grills and an aggressively prodigious use of right angles on the blades make these servers look more at home in a Mad Max film than a contemporary data centre.
The C460 has also come quite a long way since its Fisher-Price M1/M2 years
2. We Form Like VOLTRON
This is probably the niftiest technical feature out of the new lineup. The B260 M4 is a full-width, two-socket blade that, when it gets together and loves another B260 M4 blade in a very special way, unifies into a 4-socket B460 M4. This is achieved by using dynotherms and infracells a “Scalability Connector”, which attaches to the front of the blades. I guess it’s Unified Computing in more ways than one.
While I’m aware that other blade vendors have had expansion blades on the market for quite a while, I’m not sure that any of them provide the ability to double your memory, CPU sockets, I/O bandwidth, and expansion slots all at the same time. No word yet on whether additional accessories such as scented candles and Barry White CDs are required to encourage a successful pairing.
More Memories
Scalable up to 6.0 terabytes of main memory when 64GB DIMMs are available, these seem aimed at memory-intensive workloads for now, as Cisco have four-socket blades in a single full-width form factor in the previous generation B420 M3 blade. However, with support for the 15-core Intel E7 v2 48xx and 88xx series CPUs, you can squeeze up to 60-cores onto the B460 M4, up from 48 in the B420 M3. For my money, if you’re looking to take up two full-width bays in your blade chassis, you’re probably better off going for a C-series rack-mount option. Or depending on your requirements and timeframe, hang out for a B420 M4 (or whatever its M4 4-socket, single full-width successor may be).
More M4s
This is the first batch of the UCS M4 generation, supporting 4-socket CPU models. Given Intel’s annual developer forum IDF14 is a few weeks away in September, we can probably expect some of the announced chips including the E5 v3 Haswells to make their way into Cisco’s existing 2-socket models such as the B200 and C220 (and other server vendor line-ups) very soon, though I won’t speculate on specific timeframes.
More Cores
Back to that Scalability Connector, I wonder also if engineering are working the capability to combine two E7-88xx four-socket systems to max out in an 8-way behemoth. That’s 120-cores and 240-threads on a single system. The CPUs support it, and it would certainly be far more attractive to buy a 4-socket system to meet your immediate requirements but still have the option to later expand into an 8-socket configuration if and when the requirement for the additional horsepower arrives. At that end of town, cost is prohibitive enough without also having to cater for future growth requirements for your application in your day-1 capex.
That said, with the obscene amount of cores Intel are cramming onto a single die these days — we’re up to 18 on the 2-socket E5-2699 v3 @ 2.3GHz in case you’re not following along at home — most workloads can be probably be catered to with a 2-socket system, especially in general purpose virtualisation.
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