Contents
Q. What is Cisco announcing?
A. Cisco is expanding the Cisco UCS
® server portfolio with a new, short-depth rack server, the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 Rack Server.
Hardware
Q. What is the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 Rack Server?
A. The Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 Rack Server is like the Cisco UCS C240 M5 – 2RU, up to two 2
nd Gen Intel
® Xeon
® Scalable processors, up to 24 DDR4 DIMMs with Intel Optane
™ DC persistent memory support, up to six PCIe Gen 3 slots, dual 10 Gb Ethernet LOMs, and M.2 drive options.
Q. How is the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 different from the UCS C240 M5?
A. The primary differences are depth – the C240 SD M5 is 22”, the C240 M5 is 29” – and the number of drives supported: the C240 SD M5 up to 6, where the C240 M5 supports up to 26 drives. The C240 SD M5 also supports the Intel Altera Arria10 FPGA PCIe adapter for acceleration of packet distribution on the 5G edge network.
Q. What are the storage options?
A. The C240 SD M5 supports up to six 2.5” NVMe, SAS, or SATA drives up to 7.6 TB. Also available as boot drives are M.2 options up to 480 GB.
Q. What are the networking options for the C240 SD M5?
A. There are two 10Gbase-T Intel X550–based LOM ports. There is also optional support for Cisco 4
th Gen Virtual Interface Cards VICs) 10/25/40/100-Gbps, and for Intel X710 10/25/40 Gbps PCIe cards.
Q. Are the 10-Gbps LOM modules 1-Gbps-capable?
A. Yes.
Q. Does the optional RAID controller consume a PCIe slot?
A. No. The RAID controller plugs into a dedicated slot, leaving all PCIe slots available for other cards.
Q. Which fabric interconnects does the C240 SD M5 support?
A. The C240 SDS M5 supports Cisco UCS 6400 Series Fabric Interconnects.
Management
Q. What are the server management solutions for the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 Rack Server?
A. It can be managed with Cisco Intersight
™ through a Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) or through UCS Manager when connected to a fabric interconnect.
Q. Does the C240 SD M5 support any management tools other than those from Cisco?
A. There are many third-party management solutions, such as Ansible and Puppet, that can utilize Cisco’s management APIs.
Other
Q. Where does the Cisco UCS C240 SD M5 Rack Server fit in Cisco’s edge compute server portfolio?
A. The C240 SD M5 is primarily targeted for telco, service providers, and industrial environments. Cisco HyperFlex
™ Edge is designed to put virtualized applications close to the customer in a 2–4 node solution that is centrally managed with Cisco Intersight exclusively. Cisco UCS Mini is designed for customers who prefer blade servers to run enterprise applications, have bare-metal applications, or need more servers than a HyperFlex Edge solution can support. The Cisco UCS E-Series, which is part of the Integrated Services Router (ISR) series, supports different types of network connectivity and light-weight applications.
Q. How does the C240 SD M5 differ from competitive servers?
A. Cisco offers two unmatched, unique differentiators: Cisco Virtual Interface Cards (VICs) and UCS Management including Cisco Intersight.
Q. What makes Cisco VICs unique?
A. Cisco VICs offer Cisco SingleConnect: the ability to use a single cable to support data, storage, and management traffic. Additionally, Cisco VICs can instantiate 256+ vNICs and vHBAs.
Q. What makes Cisco Intersight unique?
A. The Cisco Intersight platform transforms the way that customers deploy and manage their UCS and HyperFlex servers. It offers a more intelligent level of management that enables IT organizations to analyze, simplify, and automate their environments in ways that were not possible with prior generations of tools.
Cisco Intersight SaaS simplifies lifecycle management, making daily tasks easier for your development and operations teams. It scales to support whatever quantity of servers you deploy, wherever you deploy it. The platform continues to learn and evolve over time, and as it does, it will improve your ability to optimize your infrastructure with insights that help you continuously adapt to change. And it makes you more agile, so you can respond more quickly to problems and issues.
The new Intersight Optimizer extends its powerful capabilities beyond Cisco infrastructure management to include full-stack visibility from infrastructure to applications, including third-party infrastructure and resources in the cloud, all with a focus on optimizing IT resources to ensure application performance.
Q. What operating systems and hypervisors are supported by the C240 SD M5?
Q. When will the C240 SD M5 be orderable?
A. Q2CY20.
Q. When will the C240 SD M5 ship?
A. Q2CY20.
Q. Where can I find more detailed information about the new Cisco UCS M5 servers?