Cisco Cisco Nexus 2224TP GE Fabric Extender Merkblatt
Customer Case Study
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Apollo Group, Inc.
● Higher Education
● Phoenix, Arizona
● 21,777 Employees
● Phoenix, Arizona
● 21,777 Employees
Business Impact:
● Delivered excellent student
experience even during peak
times
times
● Doubled network size without
increasing staff
● Lowered per-port switch costs
while increasing ports
● Freed up several rows in the data
center
Online Higher Education Institution Prepares for Growth
Apollo Group, Inc. created highly scalable and available data center switching architecture with
Nexus platform.
Business Challenge
Founded in 1973, Apollo Group, Inc., is a leading provider of higher education programs for working adults. University
of Phoenix, Apollo Group’s flagship university, has more than 400,000 students, 24,000 faculty members, and 200
campuses and learning centers nationwide.
Apollo Group’s learning and business applications reside on approximately 7500 servers in three data centers in the
Phoenix metropolitan area. The IT team wanted to upgrade the data center network, for two reasons. First, the
existing switches had begun to falter during peak traffic times, affecting students’ experience. “Online education is a
competitive market, and a student who can’t access our servers or experiences slow performance might choose
another educational provider,” says Dennis Crowe, director of network engineering for Apollo Group.
In addition, Apollo requires a modular and scalable switch architecture in order to address future student demand.
“If we need to add tens of thousands of servers to support growth, we want our IT infrastructure to be ready,”
Crowe says.
Solution and Results
Apollo built its next-generation data center infrastructure using the Cisco Nexus family of switches. “The Cisco Nexus
platform provides the 10 Gigabit Ethernet connectivity we need as we continue to virtualize,” Crowe says. “It also has
capabilities that will make it easier to scale the network as we offer IaaS, like Virtual Device Contexts on the core,
virtual PortChannel (vPC) to double server bandwidth, and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders to minimize
management points.”