Cisco entered the server market in 2009 because the company thought incumbent vendors weren’t satisfying customers. On Monday, the networking giant entered the edge infrastructure market for the same reason.

Switchzilla’s entry to the market is dubbed the “Unified Edge,” a name that reflects its belief that infrastructure installed beyond the datacenter needs to integrate compute, storage, and networking equipment. The company has therefore aimed its new offering at organizations that need infrastructure in many locations – retailers with many branches, or manufacturers that need dozens of servers in different locations – but which are tired of having to manage discrete servers, storage, and networks from different vendors.

Cisco’s answer is a 3U chassis called the UCS XE9305 and new half-width devices – UCS servers packing a Xeon 6, and a Catalyst 8200 router that includes a firewall – that fit into one of the five available bays. A 25G backplane ties them all together.

The chassis is just 18 inches (45.7 cm) deep, shorter than standard datacenter racks because Cisco thinks edge locations aren’t large enough to support bigger boxes. Fans at the rear of the chassis can therefore operate effectively even if they’re pressed up against a wall. It’s also possible to stand the chassis on its edge – think portrait mode, but for edge infrastructure.

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Admins maintain the devices in the chassis with Cisco’s SaaS-y Intersight management tool. Jeremy Foster, general manager of Compute at Cisco, told The Register the company designed Intersight to manage datacenters hosting thousands of servers, but has worked to ensure it can handle thousands of edge locations each hosting three or more servers and running stacks from Nutanix, Red Hat, and VMware – the three vendors Cisco currently supports for this product.

Cisco relies on those platforms’ ability to offer software-defined storage. As Cisco’s servers offer the chance to use a pair of M.2 solid state disks, and up to four E3.S NVMe drives, capacity should not be an issue.

The chassis is designed so staff without IT skills, such as managers in a retail environment, can maintain them. Servers are therefore hot-swappable, with remote techies using Intersight able to bring them online.

Cisco UCS XE9305 Unified Edge chassis - Click to enlarge

Some servers that run in the Unified Edge chassis can house GPUs, a reflection of Cisco’s belief that AI matters on the edge – especially for workloads like computer vision. Foster thinks that as CPU vendors improve their products’ ability to handle inferencing workloads, Unified Edge will become a better proposition for AI workloads.

Cisco doesn’t begin to seriously contemplate new products unless it believes it can cash in on a very significant opportunity. Foster told The Register Cisco thinks this product will succeed because while users think the likes of HPE, Lenovo, and Dell make fine hardware, they’re not able to package it with integrated networking and security, plus management tools to drive it all together.

Unified Edge is therefore a very Cisco product, as it reflects the company’s core belief that integrated networking and security are essential, and that more manageable servers matter. The product is available for order now and will ship in December. ®