Cisco UCS X-Series Direct Data Sheet

 

The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct expands the successful Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System with a new dimension of edge scale computing.

Product overview

The Cisco UCS^® X-Series Direct simplifies your data center, adapting to the unpredictable needs of modern applications while also providing an edge scaled for remote branch office workloads. It minimizes the IT infrastructure deployed at edge locations to achieve desired business outcomes. As customers are looking to increase the number of applications at the edge while deploying as little IT infrastructure as possible, the Cisco UCS^® X-Series Direct, powered by Cisco Intersight^® and Cisco UCS Manager, enables the benefits of scale together with a secure and unified connectivity.

The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct begins with the Cisco UCS X9508 Chassis engineered to be adaptable and future ready. It is a standard, open system designed to deploy and automate faster in concert with a hybrid-cloud environment.

With a midplane-free design, I/O connectivity for the X9508 chassis is accomplished with frontloading, vertically oriented compute nodes intersecting with horizontally oriented I/O connectivity modules in the rear of the chassis. The I/O connectivity modules of the solution are the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct Fabric Interconnect Modules, a unified fabric for Ethernet and Fibre Channel. Additionally, the UCS X9508 chassis can have expanded GPU capabilities using the Cisco UCS X-Fabric technology which interconnects X-series compute and PCIe nodes using high-speed PCIe technology.

Cisco UCS X-Series Direct architectural options

Features and benefits

Table 1.        Features and benefits

Simplification for workloads at the edge

The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct provides a lossless and deterministic converged fabric for management, Ethernet, and storage connectivity for the Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System. With full Intersight management capabilities through Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect 9108 100G, it offers the same simplicity and functionality as Cisco UCS X-Series and at the same time reduces the CapEx for small data centers and remote locations.

With the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct, customers can extend the Cisco UCS X-Series architecture into environments with fewer requirements for compute architecture yet still work on an enterprise level. A flat network-layer architecture allows simpler connectivity and helps connecting at the edge or in smaller domains. The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct takes the simplicity to a next level:

●      Get simplified connectivity at the edge: with direct connectivity to the top-of-rack switch, the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct helps customers get fast access to all resources, simplifying diagnostics, cabling, and management. With a combined network layer for Ethernet and Fibre Channel traffic, it is an ideal fit for environments where you run either a complete data center or just a single solution such as Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI), Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI), or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). The integration of third-party solutions, including storage from NetApp, Pure Storage, Dell, Hitachi, and IBM helps run your applications in a single environment.

●      Support a broader range of use cases: the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct enables customers to run specific solutions, such as hyperconverged, container, or data protection infrastructure in small data centers or remote locations, based on a single-server architecture. This simplifies overall management and increases the flexibility to run multiple applications on the same hardware.

●      Simplify with future-ready technology: with a modular system designed to support future generations of processors, storage, nonvolatile memory, and accelerators, the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct is ready to house technology for today with an approach that embraces the future.

●      Simplify with cloud-operated infrastructure: with management pulled out of servers and chassis and put into the cloud with Cisco Intersight or through Cisco UCS Manager you can manage your entire infrastructure and respond at the speed and scale of your business. You can shape the Cisco UCS X-Series Direct resources to workload requirements with the Cisco Intersight cloud-operations platform or Cisco UCS Manager and gain intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for all of your applications and infrastructure. Automation drives agility and consistency, helping you reduce time to market while lowering cost and risk.

Platform support

Table 2.        Platform support

Product sustainability

Information about Cisco’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) initiatives and performance is provided in Cisco’s CSR and sustainability reporting.

Table 3.        Cisco environmental sustainability information

Product specifications

Table 4.        Product specifications

Table 5.        Regulatory standards compliance: safety and EMC

System requirements

Table 6.        System requirements

Ordering Information

Table 7.        Ordering Information

Warranty information

The Cisco UCS X-Series Direct has a three-year Next-Business-Day (NBD) hardware warranty and a 90-day software warranty.

Augmenting the Cisco Unified Computing System^™ (Cisco UCS) warranty, Cisco Smart Net Total Care^® and Cisco Solution Support services are part of Cisco's technical services portfolio. Cisco Smart Net Total Care combines Cisco's industry-leading and award-winning foundational technical services with an extra level of actionable business intelligence that is delivered to you through the smart capabilities in the Cisco Smart Net Total Care portal. For more information, please refer to https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/services/smart-net-total-care/index.html.

Cisco Solution Support includes both Cisco^® product support and solution-level support, resolving complex issues in multivendor environments on average 43 percent more quickly than with product support alone. Cisco Solution Support is a critical element in data-center administration, helping rapidly resolve issues encountered while maintaining performance, reliability, and return on investment. This service centralizes support across your multivendor Cisco environment for both our products and solution partner products that you have deployed in your ecosystem. Whether there is an issue with a Cisco product or with a solution partner product, just call us. Our experts are the primary point of contact and own the case from first call to resolution. For more information, please refer to https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/services/technical/solution-support.html.

Cisco and Partner Services

Cisco and our industry-leading partners deliver services that accelerate your transition to a Cisco UCS X-Series Modular System solution. Cisco Unified Computing Services can help you create an agile infrastructure, accelerate time to value, reduce costs and risks, and maintain availability during deployment and migration. After deployment, our services can help you improve performance, availability, and resiliency as your business needs evolve and help you further mitigate risk. For more information, visit https://www.cisco.com/go/unifiedcomputingservices.

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