Like its fellow hardware suppliers, Cisco Systems Inc. hopes to capitalize on the rapid growth of unstructured data and the resulting rise in enterprise storage requirements.

The latest fruit of the company’s efforts is the UCS-S converged infrastructure family, which was unveiled today at its annual partner summit in San Francisco. Cisco says that the series has been specifically designed with data-intensive applications in mind. The first model in the lineup is the S3260 that can be equipped with a pair of either UCS M3 or UCS M4 blade servers. Both machines are based on a dual-socket design, but the former runs two of Intel Corp.’s E5-2600 v2 processors while the latter sports the newer and more powerful v4 chips.

The two blade servers provide up to 72 processing cores between them, which customers can pair with SSDs or HDDs depending on how latency-sensitive their workloads are. A company that wants to run fraud detection software, for instance, could order the S3260 with as much as 90 terabytes of raw flash storage and 1.6 terabytes of NVMe cache. Cisco says the system’s performance-optimized configuration also lends itself to security diagnostics tools, recommendation engines and other similarly demanding applications.

Organizations that prioritize storage density over speed, meanwhile, can load up to 56 disk drives into the S3260 for a maximum capacity of 600 terabytes. Cisco says that the system has a total cost of ownership of $0.015 per gigabyte per month when deployed in such a configuration, compared with Amazon S3’s $0.045 per gigabyte per month, making it 53 percent more cost-efficient. The company hopes that the system will enable it to compete for the second-tier storage workloads that are increasingly being moved to the cloud these days to reduce costs.

The list includes employee-created files, business datasets used for historical analysis and snapshots, among many others. Xerox Corp., one of first customers that Cisco has managed to win over, is using the S3260 to power its backup and archiving environment. The printing giant claims to have seen 33 percent reduction in storage costs since adopting the system.

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