The Cisco UCS B200 M5 model is mounted in the Cisco UCS 5108 chassis and has a half width. The maximum number of such blades in the chassis can be 8 pieces, which allows you to simply scale the infrastructure.

The main differences between Cisco UCS B200 M5 are the possibility of a dense location of resources, support for virtual and physical environments. The most common area of use for such blade servers is data center and structure distribution.

Detailed description of the Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade server

The model is designed for use in a distributed infrastructure environment, which is typical for a variety of corporate environments. The Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade server is the optimal solution for information processing centers, as it is characterized by a balanced density of placement and a high level of performance.

Cisco UCS B200 M5 is capable of operating under severe workloads, which allows you to deploy any practical cloud solutions. Using servers of this type, you can easily maintain various commercial software.

The Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade server does not require additional power and cooling systems, except for the standard ones provided in the chassis, and the computing power is sufficient for resource-demanding enterprise applications, including SAP HANA and Oracle.

Technical data

Let’s look at the key technical characteristics of the Cisco UCS B200 M5.

The form factor

The blade server has a half—width – half-width blade. A maximum of 8 such blade servers can be installed in the chassis 5108 Blade Server chassis.

Processor

The UCS B200 M5 model is a 2-processor blade based on Intel Xeon Scalable, which has support for the following processor lines:

• Bronze;
• Platinum;
• Silver;
• Gold.

The device also provides the possibility of mounting up to 2 Nvidia GPUs – one video card each in the superstructure slots (mezzanine) on the front and back sides of the case.

Memory

Each of the blade server processors has 2 three-channel memory controllers, each of which supports 2 RAM bars.

As a result, it turns out that the UCS B200 M5 can have 12 modules for each processor and 24 for the entire system.

Input/Output

The UCS B200 M5 blade server is equipped with an mLOM (modular LAN on Motherboard) slot in the back for convergent adapters with the possibility of installing an additional adapter from above, in the superstructure slot (mezzanine slot). Adapter installation options:

• mLom slot: 
  • Cisco UCS VIC 1440 ( 4×10-Gbps unified I/O)
  • Cisco VIC 1340 (2-port 40 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet))
• [rear] Mezzanine slot:
  • Cisco UCS VIC 1480 mezzanine card (+4 10-Gbps unified I/O ports to VIC 1440)
  • Cisco VIC 1380 mezzanine card (+2 40-Gbps unified I/O ports to VIC 1340 )
  •  Cisco port expander mezzanine card (+4 10-Gbps unified I/O ports to VIC 1440 )
  • Cisco nVIDIA P6 GPU rear mezzanine card
  • Cisco blade NVMe storage card

There is another superstructure slot in the front — front mezzanine slot — for installation in it:

• [front] Mezzanine slot:
  • Cisco FlexStorage 12-Gbps SAS RAID Controller
  • Cisco FlexStorage 12-Gbps SAS RAID Controller with 2-GB cache
  • Cisco FlexStorage NVMe or pass-through module
  • Cisco nVIDIA P6 GPU front mezzanine card

Data storage

To store local data in the blade server, you can install the following options:

• 2 SD (Secure Digital)-32, 64 or 128 GB cards with mirroring function;
• 2 M.2 SATA flash drives of 240 or 960 GB;
• PCIe Flash — 560 GB High Endurance or 3.2 Tb Medium Endurance, which are installed in the Rear Mezzanine slot;
• two 2.5-inch hot-plug SSD/HDD or NVMe from the front of the device. 

Features of the Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server

Among the main features of the equipment, the following should be highlighted:

• The “heart” of the blade server is 2 Intel Xeon processors, including a top-end one with 28 cores per 1 chip: enough to withstand the workloads of modern virtual and physical environments.
• The equipment has 24 DIMM cells into which DDR4 memory modules can be mounted. With each new bar added, productivity increases. The maximum amount of RAM can be 3 TB.
• Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory can be installed on half of the slots.
• Network devices can be connected via the ports of the converged adapter Cisco VIC 1340/1440 40/10, Gb in the mLOM+ slot of the add-on adapter Cisco VIC 1380/1480 and Port Expander (mezzanine slot).
• The standard data storage subsystem can be supplemented with 2 2.5-inch drives. It is possible to connect both solid-state drives and mechanical disks.

Advantages of the Cisco UCS B200 M5 Blade Server

A fairly powerful hardware component combined with Cisco UCS Manager management software makes the UCS B200 M5 an extremely high-performance and maximally secure solution.

Due to the careful design of the case and the high density of installation of several servers, the UCS B200 M5 should be attributed to one of the most compact and affordable devices.

Among other advantages of this blade server, the following stand out:

• 1 adapter for expansion boards from the front and back of the case;
• a large selection of expansion boards;
• 2 GPU;
• subsystem for storing Cisco Flex Storage local disks;
• 2 small form factor slots (SFF, 2.5”) for SSD/HDD media installation;
• connection of up to 2 M.2 SATA or SD memory cards;
• the maximum throughput is 80 GB per second over LAN/SAN interfaces.

Cisco UCS B200 M5 blade servers are capable of performing the most diverse data upload to local storage.

To work with resource-intensive applications, the machine has the ability to connect up to 2 GPUs, a well-thought-out control mechanism is able to transfer many tasks to the autonomous mode.