BANGALORE, INDIA: Further strengthening its $70 billion data centre networking business, networking company Cisco today launched its second generation unified computing system platform and fabric-based computing architecture.

Building on its unified computing system launched a year ago, where Cisco converged computing, storage, network and virtualization, the company brings in extended features in its new UC (unified communication) architecture.

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With new compute, I/O, management and developer capabilities the second-generation platform is capable of four times the compute, bandwidth and storage capabilities (it has a 384G sized RAM), than its predecessor, claims the company.

Cisco says that unlike a non-fabric architecture where eight interfaces are there, the fabric architecture has two interfaces. The company further claims that by simplifying I/O and cabling structure, the system reduces capital expense by over 30 per cent and operational expense by 40 per cent.

Pramodh Menon, senior vice president, Cisco India & SAARC, said: "Fabric-based computing helps enable a "wire once" deployment model where changing configurations no longer means installing new components or recabling the existing ones. Cloud computing is where the fabric architecture will be playing an important role in future."

Today with 10 GbE and fibre channel over Ethernet coming in, Cisco sees its fabric architecture becoming a major attraction for private cloud builders and moving forward for large public cloud builders as well.