Cisco yesterday unveiled its vision of the data center architecture in industry’s first unified computing system. The company has added this new element as part of its Data Center 3.0 strategy, which aims at reducing total cost of ownership, accelerate business growth, and the extend the lifecycle of current infrastructure.

The Unified Computing System reunites compute, network, storage access, and virtualization resources into one efficient system, meant to reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, help extend capital assets and improve business agility.

“The Virtual Machine has become the new atomic building block of the data center, creating new challenges and opportunities with the potential to transform the computing environment and deliver significant benefits,” said Mario Mazzola, senior vice president, Server Access and Virtualization Business Unit, Cisco.

By taking advantage of the architectural shift in the data center, Cisco has developed a new computing model that turns the data center into a dynamic IT environment, Mazzola continued. This will raise the benefits of virtualization to a new level, he also said.

The system includes the new Cisco UCS B-series blades based on the future Nehalem processor families, which support applications with large data sets and more virtual machines per server; support for a low-latency, lossless, 10 Gigabit-per-second Ethernet foundation; virtualization; consolidated access to storage area networks (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS); and energy efficiency.

The Cisco Unified Computing System will be widely available to customers in the second quarter of 2009, the company confirmed.