The form-factor-agnostic Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS™) combines Cisco UCS C-Series Rack Servers and B-Series Blade Servers with networking and storage access in 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 C240 M3 Rack Server (two rack units [2RU]) and Cisco UCS C220 M3 Rack Server (1RU) 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 and disk drives and faster I/O. Together these server improvements and complementary Cisco UCS advancements deliver the combination of features and cost efficiency required to support IT's diverse server needs.

The Cisco UCS C240 M3 Rack Server (Figure 1) is designed for both performance and expandability over a wide range of storage-intensive infrastructure workloads, from big data to collaboration. Building on the success of the Cisco UCS C210 M2 Rack Server, the enterprise-class Cisco UCS C240 M3 server further extends the capabilities of the Cisco UCS portfolio in a 2RU form factor with the addition of the Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 and E5-2600 v2 product families, which deliver an outstanding combination of performance, flexibility, and efficiency gains. The Cisco UCS C240 M3 offers up to two Intel® Xeon® processor E5-2600 or E5-2600 v2 processors, 24 DIMM slots, 24 disk drives, and four 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN-on-motherboard (LOM) ports to provide exceptional levels of internal memory and storage expandability and exceptional performance.
The Cisco UCS C240 M3 interfaces with Cisco UCS using another Cisco innovation, the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card. The Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card 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 Rack Servers. The VIC is a dual-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe adapter that can support up to 256 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 VIC 1225 can support network interface virtualization and Cisco® Data Center Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology.