A Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) is a data center server computer product line composed of server hardware, virtualization support, switching fabric, and management software, introduced in 2009 by Cisco Systems.
UCS products are designed and configured to work together effectively.The goal of a UCS product line is to simplify the number of devices that need to be connected, configured, cooled and secured and provide administrators with the ability to manage everything through a single graphical interface.
The term unified computing system is often associated with Cisco. Cisco UCS products have the ability to support traditional operating sytem (OS) and application stacks in physical environments, but are optimized for virtualized environments. Everything is managed through Cisco UCS Manager, a software application that allows administrators to provision the server, storage and network resources all at once from a single pane of glass. Similar offerings to Cisco UCS include HP BladeSystem Matrix, Liquid Computing's LiquidIQ, Sun Modular Datacenter and InteliCloud 360.
