Cisco UCS-X Series Recieves Approval As A SEAL Sustainable Product of the Year

Cisco UCS-X Series receives the seal of approval as a SEAL Sustainable Product of the Year

In May this year Cisco UCS X-Series received the 2023 SEAL Sustainable Product Award, which honours products that are “purpose-built” for a sustainable future.

Winning product awards was not the primary goal of the Cisco UCS X-Series engineering teams who successfully delivered this product to market in 2021.  The teams behind X-Series designed a blade computing system capable of taking on any x86 workload – including those yet to emerge – in a modular form factor while providing all the flexibility of a rack mount server.

Energy-efficiency and advanced power management have been a hallmark of UCS going back to the original servers we delivered in 2009. Today, the need for more energy-efficient and intelligent power management has never been greater. Servers typically represent 43 percent of the power consumed in a data centre. That number goes up to 61 percent when energy for cooling is factored.

What’s also true is that IT is under pressure to operate more sustainably as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) becomes a high priority for their companies. With data centres using more than 50 times the energy of typical commercial office buildings, they are a natural target for energy-saving initiatives. This makes UCS X-Series one of the best servers in the market for an increasing number of customers who are making purchasing and deployment decisions based on #sustainability benefits.

Here’s a snapshot of those benefits:

• The latest-generation of the UCS X-Series (M7) is 54 percent more energy efficient at the processing (CPU) level than previous generations.
• As a modular blade computing system that can be upgraded and reused, the UCS X-Series can drive 50 percent lower consumption of raw materials than traditional rack servers over three generations.
• UCS X-Series is cloud managed by Cisco Intersight, enabling constant monitoring in terms of energy usage. Because Intersight is SaaS-based, customers gain visibility of compute power utilization across all their data centres, sites, and locations in one tool, enabling them to dynamically adjust power usage for optimal efficiency.
• UCS X-Series features a future-ready architecture that can make a major impact in terms of sustainability. An example is the ability to incorporate liquid cooling technology for servers as that technology becomes mainstream. In general, liquid cooling can be up to 60 percent more energy efficient than air-cooled servers.

Here’s how these benefits translate into real-world impact. In a scenario where UCS X-Series is replacing 64 previous-generation servers:

• Customers can use 3.3x less hardware overall, saving precious rack space.
• They can also reduce almost 100,000 kilowatt hours (KwH) of energy, or the equivalent of powering 10 residential homes for a full year.
• The result is that we can help save almost 40 tons of carbon dioxide (tCO2e) emissions.

If you consider that large enterprises will have thousands of servers deployed in their data centres globally, the sustainability maths add up quickly.

That’s why we’re delighted that Cisco UCS X-Series is being recognized by SEAL, an organization that drives real accountability for environmental progress, and incredibly proud of the design and engineering teams who worked so hard to make this product a reality.

For more information on UCS-X Series please visit https://www.cisco.com/go/ucsx or contact your Cisco representative.