Cisco Cisco Nexus 2224TP GE Fabric Extender Leaflet

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Customer Case Study 
© 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. 
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 
Rakuten Inc.  
●  Online retail, banking/credit card/online 
security, travel, e-book 
●  Tokyo, Japan 
●  Over 83,000,000 users, 40,000 sellers 
BUSINESS CHALLENGE 
●  Improving customer satisfaction 
●  Reducing operational costs 
●  Rapid traffic growth 
NETWORK SOLUTION 
●  Cisco Nexus 2200, Nexus B22, Nexus 5500 
Switches 
●  FabricPath, Layer 3, vPC 
BUSINESS RESULTS 
●  Reduced operational cost 
●  Increased agility 
●  Increased customer satisfaction 
Rakuten Inc.     
Japanese Online Retailer Supports Rapidly Expanding Network 
 
Rakuten uses Cisco solutions to upgrade network to meet 
operational demands and reduce costs. 
Business Challenge 
Rakuten Ichiba is the largest online retail service in Japan, with over 83 
million users, 40,000 sellers, and approximately 100 million products 
available through its service. Rakuten’s business is expanding widely, 
and includes not only online retail, but also online banking, credit and 
payment, online security trading, travel, and e-book businesses. 
Rakuten is strategicaly investing in the global expansion of its business 
throughout North America, South America, Asia-Pacific, Japan, China, 
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.. 
Because Rakuten’s business is growing rapidly and getting more 
complex through mergers and acquisition, the company needs to build 
infrastructure support for a dynamic market enviroment. The 
company’s previously isolated data center infrustructure resulted in 
complex operations that were prone to human errors, limited scalability, difficult-to-manage processes. These issues 
led to slow service development, deployment, and service response time, and ultimately to lost opportunity. 
Network Solution 
Rakuten and Cisco worked together to design a new data center architecture that would perform reliably and provide 
scalability for the future. Rakuten, which is aggressively adopting new technology for its advantages and business 
benefits, decided to deploy a new data center based on Cisco Nexus® 5500 Switches and Cisco® FabricPath 
technology within the data center as well as throughout the network.  
Rakuten deployed Cisco Nexus 5500 Switches with Layer 3 modules with modern spine/leaf architecture, and Nexus 
2200 and Nexus B22 Switches that leverage Cisco FabricPath and vPC technology. Cisco Nexus Switches and 
FabricPath are the foundation of the company’s data center infrastructure, which processes mission-critical 
application traffic for Rakuten Ichiba service, which is the core business for Rakuten Inc. 
Rakuten’s data center has now operated for more than a year with Cisco Nexus Switches and FabricPath without any 
major issue. Rakuten is now continuing to expand its data center infrastructure on an on-demand basis with Cisco 
Nexus 5500 Switches and FabricPath technologies.  
Rakuten not only leveraged Cisco FabricPath as a data center technology, but also decided to deploy it as an 
interconnect technology, since Cisco FabricPath is simple to deploy and operate and provides fast convergence time 
and superior performance. Now many of Rakuten’s data centers are connected with Cisco FabricPath technology.  
Cisco Nexus 5500 Switches provide a compact 1RU or 2RU platform, but they also provides high-density 10 GbE, 
FabricPath and rich L3 features.  Even in scale, Nexus 5500 Switches can offer several hundreds of server 
connections. Nexus 5500 and FEX architecture minimize initial cost, and scale very well.