Today, Cisco announced their exciting, new addition to the UCS portfolio: the M5 series.
Citrix workloads have been running on Cisco hardware since the beginning of the UCS line — way back in the M1 days — and we are proud to be a launch partner for the M5 debut. Our mutual customers count on the reliability and performance of Cisco UCS and the security, manageability and performance of Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop. Together, Citrix and Cisco provide a winning combination for anyone’s digital transformation needs.
As Cisco points out, M5 is not a server, it’s a system. M5 is a system built on the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors that will provide greater performance and flexibility that ever before. Of note for Citrix customers are three key features:
- Highest GPU density in the industry. Combined with XenDesktop’s HDX 3D Pro capabilities, the new M5 system will be able to drive a greater number of graphics-intensive workloads per host at a higher level of performance than ever before.
- Future-proof. The M5 system’s flexible and modular architecture allows customers to tune and scale compute, storage, I/O, and memory to meet the changing needs of a growing and changing desktop virtualization environment. This dovetails nicely with XenDesktop’s ability to help customers manage change at the desktop OS and application layers where patches, updates and upgrades can be a challenge without a system that is ready to deal with continuous change.
- Ready for cloud management. M5 will be ready for Cisco’s new Unified management system which will enable management of UCS and other Cisco components from the Cloud. This aligns perfectly with Citrix Cloud, which can be leveraged to manage XenApp and XenDesktop servers running on UCS on-premises or from the Cloud. Citrix even provides a method for offloading control plane components to Citrix Cloud, so that customers can focus on running only user workloads on Cisco UCS servers located anywhere they wish.
M5 ushers in a new dawn for increased performance, flexibility and scale, which is right on time for the digital transformation wave. Citrix is proud to be a launch partner and we look forward to serving our mutual customers with our industry leading combined solutions.
