SAN JOSE, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/22/09 -- Technology professionals in a wide variety of industries are deploying Cisco® Data Center 3.0 solutions to cut costs and improve efficiency through virtualization, performance optimization, and greater flexibility to respond to changing business requirements. Organizations that have recently deployed Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) data center technologies include: the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Lafarge North America, Casas Bahia and the Independent Purchasing Cooperative.

Customer Profiles

University of North Carolina at Charlotte: Cisco Trusted Partner for New Data Center SAN Deployment and Application Delivery

• 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: Construction Materials Provider Centralizes Branch-Office Servers with Cisco WAN Optimization and Storage Solutions

• 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 Cisco WAAS Deployments Worldwide

• 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

Independent Cooperative Purchasing: Providing Market-Leading Pricing and Products to Subway Franchisees with the Cisco Nexus 7000

• 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(TM) 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

Cisco Data Center Technology Facts:

• 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.

Supporting Resources:

Cisco Data Center 3.0

• Interact: Cisco Data Center Blog
• Learn: Data Center Solutions - Cisco - Cisco Systems
• Learn: Cisco Virtualization

Storage Networking

• 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

Cisco WAAS

• Read: Lafarge Customer Case Study
• Learn: Cisco WAAS Forrester Total Economic Impact Report

Cisco ACE

• Learn: Cisco ACE Application Control Engine

Nexus 7000

• Learn: www.cisco.com/go/nexusnow

Advanced Services

• View: Cisco Data Center Services interview with Faiyaz Shahpurwala, VP Cisco Advanced Services

Technorati tags: Cisco, Cisco WAAS, Cisco Nexus, Cisco ACE, Cisco MDS, Cisco Blade Switches, Cisco Vframe, Cisco InfiniBand, Cisco Catalyst Switches, Applications Delivery Networks, Data Center, Virtualization, WAN Optimization, Enterprise, Application Performance, IT Centralization, IT Consolidation

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