Earlier in 2014, Cisco unleashed a new line of M-Series modular servers to meet the high-density, low-power demands of massively parallelized and cloud-scale applications. These modular servers separate the infrastructure components, such as network, storage, power, and cooling, from the compute nodes and deliver compute and memory to provide scalable and resource demanding applications. These compute nodes provide processing and memory resources directly to applications without any virtualization with unified management capabilities through UCS Manager A modular chassis and compute cartridges are the building blocks of these M-Series servers. The M4308 chassis can hold up to eight compute cartridges. Each cartridge has a single or dual CPU with two memory channels and provides two nodes in a single cartridge to support up to 16 compute nodes in a single chassis. The cartridges are hot-pluggable and can be added or removed for the system. The Cisco VIC provides connectivity to UCS Fabric Interconnects from network and management.

The UCS M-Series modular server includes the following components:

• Modular chassis M4308
• Modular compute cartridges-M2814, M1414, and M142