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Today’s announcements extend Cisco’s data center portfolio and are a critical step in the company’s Data
Center 3.0 strategy. To help customers accelerate the transition to the Unified Computing architecture, Cisco is
paving the way with a comprehensive suite of new Unified Computing services. In addition, Cisco announced collaboration with industry leaders on the Unified Computing System and architecture.

• The Cisco Unified Computing System: Based on industry standards, the Unified Computing System is a
new computing model that uses integrated management and combines a “wire once” unified fabric with an
industry standard computing platform to optimize virtualization, reduce data center total overall cost, and
provide dynamic resource provisioning for increased business agility.
o Reduces total cost of ownership: up to 20 percent reduction in capital expenditures (CAPEX) and up
to 30% reduction in operational expenditures (OPEX).
o Improves IT productivity and improves business agility: provision applications in minutes instead of
days. Shifts the focus from IT maintenance to IT innovation
o Increases scalability without added complexity: managed as a single system, whether it has one or
320 servers with thousands of virtual machines.
o Improves Energy Efficiency: significantly reduces power and cooling costs
o Provides interoperability and investment protection through industry standards-based infrastructure

• Innovative Design for Next Generation Data Centers
Taking a clean slate architectural approach to data center infrastructure,
Cisco introduced the Unified
Computing System which unites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a scalable,
modular architecture that is managed as a single system. The Unified Computing System is the first
offering in a new family of products which complements the Cisco data center portfolio. Key Unified
Computing System elements include:

o Compute– Cisco designed an entirely new class of computing system which incorporates the new
Cisco UCS B-Series blades based on the future Intel® Nehalem processor families (the next
generation Intel® Xeon® processor). The Cisco blades offer patented extended memory technology
to support applications with large data sets and allow significantly more Virtual Machines per
server.
o Network– The Cisco Unified Computing System provides support for a unified fabric over a lowlatency,
lossless, 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet foundation. This network foundation consolidates
what today are three separate networks: local area networks (LANs), storage area networks (SANs)
and high performance computing networks. This lowers costs by reducing the number of network
adapters, switches, and cables and by decreasing power and cooling requirements.
o Virtualization– The Cisco Unified Computing System unleashes the full potential of virtualization,
by enhancing the scalability, performance and operational control of virtual environments. Cisco
security, policy enforcement, and diagnostics features are now extended into dynamic virtualized
environments to better support changing business and IT requirements.
o Storage Access– The Cisco Unified Computing System provides consolidated access to both
storage area networks (SANs) and to network attached storage (NAS). Support for a unified fabric
means that the Unified Computing System can access storage over Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre
Channel over Ethernet or iSCSI, providing customers with choices and investment protection. In
addition, IT staff can pre-assign storage access policies for system connectivity to storage resources,
simplifying storage connectivity and management, and helping to increase IT productivity.
o Management– Management is uniquely integrated into all the components of the system, enabling
the entire solution to be managed as a single entity through the Cisco UCS Manager. The Cisco
UCS Manager provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), a command line interface (CLI),
and a robust application programming interface (API) to manage all system configuration and
operations. Cisco UCS Manager helps to increase IT staff productivity, enabling IT managers of
storage, networking, compute and applications to collaborate on defining service profiles for
applications. Service profiles help to automate provisioning and increase business agility, allowing
data center managers to provision applications in minutes instead of days.

• Energy Efficiency– IT managers can achieve more energy efficient data centers with the Cisco Unified
Computing System – it uses one-half the components, and requires less cabling and power/cooling than
legacy server installations.

• Cisco Unified Computing Services
o Building on more than a decade of experience in the data center, Cisco today launched a suite of
new Unified Computing Services to help customers capture the full technical and business benefits
of the Cisco Unified Computing architecture.
o Strengthening the data center portfolio already offered by Cisco and our partners, the new services
range from architecture design, planning, and migration, to operations, and remote management.
These services touch all aspects of data center resources?people, processes, and technologies.
o Cisco’s unique collaborative services model combines Cisco Services’ deep intellectual property
with best-in-class services partnerships to deliver integrated solutions to our customers.

• Open Partner Ecosystem – Cisco is collaborating with an open ecosystem of industry leaders to help
stimulate technology innovation, augment service delivery, and accelerate market adoption of Unified
Computing.

• The Cisco Unified Computing System and associated services will be generally available to customers
starting in calendar the second quarter of 2009.