James Leach & Todd Brannon, Cisco, talk with Dave Vellante in this CUBEconversation Inside Cisco’s new UCS architecture, X-Series BY ALICE GILLIN In 2009, Cisco Systems Inc. released the Unified Computing System, an integrated package of computing infrastructure that was designed to get customers up and running quickly. UCS addressed scalability issues by virtualizing components and managing them as a single unit. Now that the cloud is mainstream, organizations are forced to bridge environments and workloads onto public clouds, raising the need for a similar solution to UCS that incorporates cloud platforms. Earlier this month, Cisco announced new UCS architecture, the X-Series. Cisco claims this system will operate for at least a decade and supply customers with a platform for both hybrid and multicloud workloads. “We’re seeing the admin developer emerge,” said James Leach (pictured, left), director of business development at Cisco. “No longer is this just a guy who’s sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems. We’re now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators. There’s a lot of change coming, and we’re realizing that something like X-Series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings in a simple manner.” Leach and Todd Brannon (pictured, right), senior director of cloud infrastructure marketing at Cisco, spoke with Dave Vallente, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during a CUBE Conversation. They discussed Cisco’s new X-Series, scaling up cloud and on-premises app development, Cisco’s cloud-agnostic approach and more. (* Disclosure below.) A change in fabric Cisco’s X-Series tools for multicloud, hybrid cloud deployments are unique, thanks to a UCS X fabric construct, according to Leach. “This gives users the ability to consume these technologies today as a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources within the chassis and future external to the chassis,” he said. This allows Cisco to take advantage of changes in fabric as fabrics evolve and as new technologies, such as CXL – which is an open interconnect for processors, memory expansion and accelerators — start to emerge. Cisco constantly looks to the horizon for disruptive technologies with the goal of preventing them from disrupting customers, Leach added. With so many cloud providers to choose from, businesses can be overwhelmed when deciding which to deploy for their organizations. Cisco adopted a cloud-agnostic approach to its platform, not confining users to only one provider. “It’s our approach, especially on the networking technology side, to make it very easy for our customers to connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to start using another public cloud provider,” Brannon concluded.