- Part of the University of North Carolina system, UNC Charlotte enrolls
more than 22,300 students and employs 900 full-time faculty. The university
expects to increase enrollment by 10,000 students and to add 150 faculty
members by 2015.
- To prepare for growth, the UNC Charlotte information technology group
is building a more scalable, resilient data center. The university will
use its existing 25 year-old data center as a disaster recovery site and
for asynchronous replication of data storage frames, high-availability
elements of the Microsoft Exchange and the enterprise resource planning
(ERP) application cluster, and services development and testing. The
university has selected the Cisco MDS 9513 Multilayer Director to deploy
highly secure and scalable SANs at both locations, as well as the Cisco
Application Control Engine (ACE) Modules in the Cisco Catalyst® 6500
Series to enable application delivery and Web portal management for
students and faculty.
- Migration of the production applications to the new facility will take
advantage of the service-oriented design of the new data center. Service
orientation allows the network and the applications that it supports to
work together. The primary goals are to increase the performance,
availability, scalability, and manageability of enterprise applications in
the data center, while simultaneously providing a highly secure
environment. In addition, these designs reduce the complexity and
implementation time of enterprise applications in the data center, using
virtualization technologies and network design best practices. The
solution is targeted to provide the advantages of high availability,
combined with an enhanced level of recoverability within the campus in a
sustainable and cost-effective manner.
- "We had outgrown the previous data center's electrical, cooling, floor
space, and data storage capacity. To support more user services and more
data, we need a service-oriented data center design that provides network,
power, and storage to applications as needed. Cisco provides outstanding
data center design and deployment services. Our Cisco data center
consultant has become part of the team, conducting a couple of half-day
sessions monthly. We regard him as a trusted advisor for all aspects of
data center design, not just the Cisco solutions."
Tom Lamb, chief technology officer, UNC Charlotte
- Lafarge North America is the largest supplier of construction materials
in the United States and Canada. Lafarge has a primary data center in
Virginia and a secondary data center in Illinois. The company's goal was
to take advantage of SAN and WAN optimization technology to reduce
operational expenses from remote offices, while increasing usage of data
center assets and cost efficiencies.
- "Our main goal with the Cisco MDS 9000 Series Multilayer Switches was
to provide for future growth and scalability of our SAN fabric, provide the
immediate port density for our data center expansion, and provide future
functionality for improved SAN extension capability over our IP network. We
have over 300 terabytes of critical business data being managed through
Cisco MDS Multilayer directors across our two core data centers and
multiple EMC, HP, and 3PAR storage frames, in addition to several virtual
and physical tape libraries. The MDS gave us a centralized solution to
reduce data center management and operational costs."
- "As soon as we installed Cisco Wide Area Application Services (WAAS),
we had several users tell us that the performance was noticeably improved
for various business applications. The fact that we've taken away servers
that were 50 feet away and replaced them in our data center that's roughly
500 miles away and no one experienced a noticeable drop in performance is
significant. Cisco WAAS will save Lafarge over $700,000 per year in
operating expenses by optimizing WAN and centralizing services in the data
center. Cost savings include $250,000 per year in operating expenses by
eliminating support for legacy email servers outside the data center, over
$420,000 in operating expenses to support legacy file, print and directory
services in the field, and over $100,000 in annual operating expenses by
reducing helpdesk, change, and service tickets associated with legacy
servers and storage footprints."
Brent Wolfram, lead architect for enterprise infrastructure, Lafarge North America
- Casas Bahia, one of the largest retailers in Brazil, has optimized
application delivery with Cisco's Wide Area Application Services (WAAS)
solution. Cisco WAAS is deployed in over 550 Casas Bahia stores throughout
Brazil, which specialize in furniture and home appliances.
- As many customers have done, Casas Bahia is deploying Cisco WAAS
through modules inserted into its network of Cisco Integrated Services
Routers (ISR), providing easy-to-manage and high-performance branch retail
location connectivity. Cisco WAAS is speeding enterprise application
delivery for DB2, one of IBM's families of relational database management
systems software products, as well as other applications.
- "Response times for several applications fell significantly, and
bandwidth usage has been optimized, freeing up space for other applications
and/or services to be implemented at the stores. We have seen applications
that had response times of 3 hours and 50 minutes before implementation
fall significantly. In addition, we have seen considerable gains from the
solution with a specific customer service application, which has agents in
one location and servers in another. In that case, response times fell from
approximately 29 seconds to just 1 second."
Frederico Wanderley, CIO, Casas Bahia
- International Purchasing Cooperative (IPC) is an independent SUBWAY®
franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative. IPC negotiates the
lowest cost for goods and services, while improving quality, enhancing
competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY restaurants and their
customers. The company has selected the Cisco Nexus 7000™ as a core 10
Gigabit data center switch, with plans to deploy the Nexus 1000 with VMware
as a distribution switch. The high-availability capabilities and
redundancy of the Nexus 7000 allow IPC to make changes without having to
bring down the entire network, as well as to merge fibre channel, Ethernet
and IP traffic.
- "IT is not viewed as a cost center at IPC, but a strategic foundation
to the direction in which the organization is moving. Cisco's Nexus 7000
gives us huge inroads in terms of competitiveness and our franchisees have
the ability to build out their technologies right the first time without
having to justify return on investment. The reason SUBWAY can create a $5
foot-long and still make a profit is largely because of the way IPC
efficiently leverages technology. Nexus allows us to be even more efficient
by enabling us to host and manage internally, which is where I expect to
see significant savings."
Fernando Mejia, senior manager of IT infrastructure, Independent Purchasing Cooperative
- The Cisco MDS 9000 Series of storage networking solutions are central
to the Cisco Data Center 3.0 architecture, providing a platform for IT
departments to achieve lower cost of ownership, enhance resilience and
greater agility.
- Cisco Wide Area Network Services (WAAS) is a comprehensive WAN
optimization solution that accelerates applications over the WAN, allowing
IT departments to centralize applications and storage in the data center,
while maintaining LAN-like application performance.
- The Cisco ACE Application Control Engine offers a virtualized
architecture to maximize application uptime, performance and security from
the data center.
- The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series offers the highest-performance data center switching in the Cisco Nexus Family of switches for data centers, delivering 10 Gigabit Ethernet, unified fabric, exceptional scalability, continuous operation, and transport flexibility.
- Interact: Cisco Data Center Blog
- Learn: Data Center Solutions - Cisco - Cisco Systems
- Learn: Cisco Virtualization
- Read: Miercom Director Class SAN Switch Lab Testing Summary Report, in which Cisco's MDS 9509 and 9513 are Rated Best for Reliability and Non-Blocking Performance
- Learn: Cisco Storage
- Read: UNCC Customer Case Study
- Learn: www.cisco.com/go/nexusnow
Contact Information: Cisco Press Contact: Sandra Livinghouse Cisco (408) 358-4709 slivingh@cisco.com Industry Analyst Contact: Amal Nichols Cisco (408) 526-6493 amnichol@cisco.com Investor Relations Contact: Marilyn Mora Cisco (408) 527-7452 marilmor@cisco.com
