Cisco announced the latest generation of its Unified Computing System (UCS) built on Intel’s Xeon E5-2600 processors announced earlier this week. The company also announced three new servers built on Intel’s latest-generation chips.

Steve Gillaspy, senior director of product management at Cisco’s Data Center group, said with this release of UCS Cisco was introducing a third-generation compute fabric, unified management and better investment protection.

“It’s all about delivering best in class application performance because in the end that’s what customers care about,” Gillaspy said.

The new UCS, Cisco’s integrated module that includes compute, network and virtualization components, has unified management for blade and rack servers within a single domain. Sometime in the second half of 2012, this third generation of UCS is also going to have unified management capabilities across multiple geographical sites.

Cisco has doubled the switching capacity of the UCS fabric, taking it from 960Gbps to 1.92Tbps. End-to-end latency of in the fabric has been reduced by 40%. All this thanks to Cisco’s new 6296UP Fabric Interconnect.

The I/O module now provides options for 80Gbps and 160Gbps down to each UCS chassis to handle workload bursts.

Cisco has built three new server products on the new Intel Xeon processor. They are the UCS B200 M3 blade server, C220 M3 rack server and C240 M3 rack server. The C220 is a one-rack-unit server and C240 is a two-rack-unit form factor.

Brian Schwarz, director of product management at Cisco’s Data Center group, said the C240 server was Cisco’s entry into the data-analytics or data warehousing market – applications commonly referred to as “Big Data”.

The C240 comes with up to 384Gb of RAM, 24 drives and four 1GbE LAN interfaces built into the motherboard, which gives it the levels of internal memory and storage expandability high enough for data analytics.

Schwarz said Big Data was a growth area in the IT industry. “Now we actually have the right form factor to play in that space.”

Cisco was one of many major IT OEMs to announce products built around Intel Xeon E5-2600 processors.

HP launched a portfolio of ProLiant servers based on the chip, for example, and Dell released a line of PowerEdge servers designed for the new Xeon. Oracle, Fujitsu and IBM also came out of the woodworks with server Xeon E5-2600 server products.