Cisco releases pricing for rack servers

Cisco this week disclosed pricing for the rack-mount servers of its Unified Computing System for data centers.

Cisco announced the rack servers in June. They are an alternative to the blade servers Cisco introduced with UCS, a system designed to integrate compute, networking virtualization and storage access for the data center.

The UCS C200 M1 High-Density Rack-Mount server is one-rack unit high, and has 96GB of memory and four disk drives. It costs $2,589 and will be available in November.

The UCS C210 M1 General-Purpose Rack-Mount server is a two-rack unit device with 96GB of memory and 16 disk drives. It costs $3,039 and will be available in November.

UCS C250 M1 Extended Memory Rack-Mount server is two rack units, and has 384GB of memory and eight disk drives. It costs $10,339 and will be available in December.

“If you're using it as just a stand-alone server, it's expensive,” says Zeus Kerravala of the Yankee Group. “But in the context of UCS — for scale and memory expansion — it's a fair price, but there are no comparative products.”

Do HP, 3Com value claims trump Cisco?

Cisco also released pricing for the UCS memory extension blade. This patented memory extender is designed to produce more than twice the addressable memory of currently available two-socket rack-mount platforms to support more virtual machines per server and run large memory applications. Cisco claims it provides 70% to 80% lower memory costs than competing two socket servers at 92 and 144GB.

The memory extension blade costs $7,300 and will be available later this month.

Cisco also unveiled a virtual interface card for the UCS B-Series blade servers. It is a converged network adapter designed to enable each virtualized adapter to define up to 128 Ethernet or Fibre Channel connections. It features two 10Gbps interfaces, costs $799 and will be available in December.

Lastly, Cisco announced that Oracle has certified UCS and Cisco's Nexus 5000 switch to run Oracle software. Oracle was one of the Cisco partners endorsing UCS at its launch.