Cisco Cisco Nexus 5010 Switch Leaflet

Kamil Vojtíšek
IT Manager, Network and Voice
GE Money Bank

Customer Case Study

To assist with day-to-day operations, the bank deployed Cisco Prime Data Center

Network Manager (DCNM). The system provides a customizable dashboard that

improves visibility and control of Cisco Nexus products through a single pane of glass.
GE Money Bank is migrating to 10Gbps server infrastructure and expects to see

an improvement in the performance of its backup clusters and server estate. It has

already seen a drop in backup times of 15 percent. Meanwhile, switch consolidation

has helped the company save costs. Vojtíšek confirms: “On a like-for-like basis, while

the Nexus platform operating cost is similar to that of our former switches, we now

have more features for the same amount of money.”

Results

GE Money Bank has strict internal downtime service level agreements (SLAs), with

a maximum three-second delay in restoration time for any connection and any

application. With the previous switches, a danger existed that these service levels

might be breached during upgrades. The Cisco Nexus Series switches resolved that

concern because they take advantage of In-Service Software Upgrades (ISSU) to

allow Cisco NX-OS software to be updated or otherwise modified without interrupting

normal operations.
“With the Nexus switches in-service software upgrade, it is really non-stop

forwarding and no packet is dropped,” says Vojtíšek. “ISSU allows upgrades to the

operating system without disruption.”
Previously, the GE Money Bank IT team had to manage its switches manually,

pre-provisioning ports by hand, but this situation is changing thanks to the ability to

configure Nexus switches using templates via Cisco Prime DCNM. “We expect that

our provisioning will be faster,” says Vojtíšek, “and using scripts we have already

reduced server port provisioning from two hours to a quarter-of-an-hour. We hope

to cut that further to just a few minutes.”
GE Money Bank has been able to reduce the number of data center infrastructure

switches it needs, from 10 to four, thanks to the scalability and availability of high-

speed ports on the Nexus platforms.
Security compliance has been significantly improved too. Prior to the project, GE

Money Bank could only deploy three levels of service. Using Cisco Virtual Device

Context (VDC), the company plans to expand this to five levels to give the business

more granular protection, access control, and traffic separation.
The bank also has three disaster recovery application tiers. Tier 1 covers mission-

critical systems and involves maintaining applications in constant active-active mode

across both data centers. For Tier 2, two copies are maintained in active-standby

mode, while Tier 3 applications are hosted at one location only. With Nexus, however,

GE Money Bank can use Cisco Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) to improve

disaster recovery capabilities for Tier 3 applications.
“OTV means we can dynamically move applications to any location,” says Vojtíšek,

“so if there was ever a big disaster, we could switch workloads between the two data

centers. Previously this just wasn’t an option.”
The solution also helps with compliance, because twice a year GE Money Bank

is required to go through a full disaster recovery exercise. This exercise involves

temporarily switching off the power at one data center and relying solely on the

backup site.
The company has gone through such tests twice since implementing Cisco Nexus,

and has not encountered any significant problems. The GE Money Bank IT team has

deployed a Cisco unified fabric with Cisco FabricPath technology, which helps enable

highly-scalable Layer 2 multipath networks without Spanning Tree Protocol, as well

as reducing administration overheads. GE Money Bank is already taking advantage of

FabricPath interfaces such as the virtual PortChannel+ (vPC+) domain, which allows

both a classic Ethernet vPC domain and a Cisco FabricPath cloud to interoperate.

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