The Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS) combines Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers and B-Series Blade Servers with networking and storage access into a single converged system that simplifies management and delivers greater cost efficiency and agility with increased visibility and control. The latest expansion of the Cisco UCS portfolio includes the new Cisco® UCS C220 M3 Rack Server (one rack unit [1RU]) and Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server (2RU) and the Cisco UCS B200 M3 Blade Server. These three new servers increase compute density through more cores and cache balanced with more memory capacity, disk drives and with faster I/O. Together these server improvements and complementary Cisco UCS advancements deliver the best combination of features and cost efficiency required to support IT's diverse server needs.

The Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server (Figure 1) is designed for performance and density over a wide range of business workloads, from web serving to distributed databases. Building on the success of the Cisco UCS C200 M2 Rack Server, the enterprise-class Cisco UCS C220 M3 server further extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 1RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 product family, which delivers significant performance and efficiency gains. In addition, the Cisco UCS C220 M3 server offers up to two Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600s product family, 16 DIMM slots, eight disk drives, and two 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports, delivering outstanding density and performance in a compact package.

The Cisco UCS C220 M3 interfaces with Cisco UCS using another unique Cisco innovation: the Cisco UCS P81E Virtual Interface Card (VIC). The Cisco UCS P81E VIC is a virtualization-optimized Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) PCI Express (PCIe) 2.0 x8 10-Gbps adapter designed for use with Cisco UCS C-Series servers. The VIC is a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter that can support up to 18 PCIe standards-compliant virtual interfaces, which can be dynamically configured so that both their interface type (network interface card [NIC] or host bus adapter [HBA]) and identity (MAC address and worldwide name [WWN]) are established using just-in-time provisioning. In addition, the Cisco UCS P81E can support network interface virtualization and Cisco® Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology.