Below are several important updates related to UCS Mini from today’s UCS Tiger Team meeting:
- B420M3 certified for Mini –> 4-socket server support
- Adoption – Over 500 UCS Mini customers, 300 of them 1st time UCS customers –> leverage UCS Mini for DR and branch office server requirements.
- GUI is HTML5-based, not Java!!! Mini was the first platform to offer HTML5 support.
- SAN Connectivity – 3 x Storage connectivity options – Network Attached for iSCSI/NFS/SMB, Direct Attached, and SAN attached
- Certification of storage vendor solutions is only required for iSCSI Boot, FC, and FCoE.
- Flexibility – Fibre Channel NPV support and Ethernet Switch mode support on the internal Fabric Interconnects –> offers greater northbound storage and LAN connectivity/local switching options. NPV offers support for interconnect with a Brocade fabric. The SAN Fabric market is only a 2 horse race – Cisco and Brocade.
- Management – Remember that UCS Mini requires it’s own version of UCS Manager, just like the M-series. Version 3.1(1) brings all 3 flavors of UCS Manager together – Mini, Classic, and M-series.
- Expandability – Support for the 2nd chassis – coming later this year
- Solutions – UCS Mini + Nimble Storage is a much more cost-effective solution as compared to Nutanix. We also have the Simplivity on C240 M3/M4 option for fully hyper-converged requirements.
- Integrated Infrastructure Solutions that include UCS Mini:
- VSPEX w/ VMware – http://cs.co/Mini-BO-vSphere–SB
- VSPEX w/ HyperV – http://cs.co/Mini-BO-HyperV–SB
- FlexPod Express
- FlexPod Data Center
- SmartStack w/ Nimble – http://cs.co/Mini-Nimble-SS-AAG
- Software Defined Storage (SDS) with StorMagic – under development
Great site for all-things UCS Mini-related: https://cisco.box.com/UCS-Mini-One-Stop-Shopping