Cisco has announced an expanded engagement with AMD to help businesses accelerate advanced digital experiences and improve hybrid cloud operations.    

With 55 percent of all enterprise on-premise applications deployed in private clouds and expectations that this number will increase to 60 percent in two years (Source: IDC's Cloud Pulse Q120, March 2020), organisations are transitioning to new innovations in systems and management platforms to meet dynamic performance, security and scale requirements for hybrid cloud infrastructure. 

Cisco is helping to solve these pressing challenges by introducing new Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) rack server models with AMD EPYC™ 7003 processors designed to support modern workloads.   The new models include the Cisco UCS C225 M6 and the Cisco UCS C245 M6 rack servers, further expanding Cisco’s AMD-based portfolio introduced in 2018.

"IT  organisations are accelerating hybrid cloud adoption to support business critical digital initiatives, and that requires a refresh of both their compute infrastructure and their operating model to maximise performance and lower costs,” said DD Dasgupta, vice president of product management for Cisco Cloud and Compute.  “Together with AMD, we are delivering systems optimised for workloads requiring high core counts, including cloud and VDI workloads, and massive I/O-intensive workloads such as data analytics.  Combined with the simplicity of SaaS-managed infrastructure, customers can improve operations spanning infrastructure, workloads and clouds.” 

The new UCS rack server models uniquely feature native integration with the Cisco Intersight hybrid cloud platform, enabling simpler management at global scale and continuous SaaS-delivered innovations.  The Cisco Intersight platform makes it easier for customers to access and deploy innovative AMD EPYC features, such as secure encrypted virtualisation.

Leadership in high frequency trading environments

These new computing options pair with the Cisco Nexus Ultra Low Latency (ULL) switching and adapter portfolio, based on technology acquired by Cisco in its acquisition of Exablaze, to create the industry’s leading end-to-end solution for ultra-high performance computing such as high frequency trading (HFT). The powerful combination of Cisco and AMD enable investment firms to efficiently process higher volumes of financial transactions at faster execution speeds compared to conventional solutions.   

“We’re excited to expand our engagement with Cisco in support of the launch of EPYC™ 7003 Series processors,” said Ram Peddibhotla, corporate vice president, EPYC product management, AMD. “Cisco’s new EPYC processor-based UCS rack servers and the native integration with the Cisco Intersight platform unlocks the full value of our EPYC processors so customers can transform their data centre operations to achieve better business results.  Our joint innovations are further showcased in Cisco’s solution for high frequency trading, which provides unmatched performance to meet the demanding requirements for this market.”