Cisco Cisco UCS Director 4.0 Information Guide

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Customer Name:

Data

Industry:

Business Technology Solutions

Location:

Headquartered in Brisbane

with offices across Australia

Number of Employees:

900

Challenge

• Increase efficiency by improving

management of converged

infrastructure environment

• Provide cost-effective managed

services, including on-premise, cloud,

and hybrid offerings

• Increase workload volume without

increasing administrative overhead

Solution

• Cisco UCS
• Cisco UCS Director
• Cisco Nexus

Results

• Quadrupled managed services

workloads without additions to

administration team

• Reduced time required to provision

VLANs in multitenant environment

from weeks to seconds

• Lets customers provision own servers

in minutes through self-service portal

Challenge

Data

3 Limited has been anticipating customer technology needs successfully for more

than 30 years, as evidenced by the fact that the company is now one of the leading
systems integrators in Australia. Data

3 uses a technology consumption model to

analyze customer trends and then maps its solutions to meet customer needs.

One of the strong emerging trends in recent years has been customer interest in
reducing capital expenses by taking advantage of cloud-based services for at least
some infrastructure requirements. In response, Data

3 formalized its managed

services solutions business three years ago. In that time, the company has
successfully grown this part of the business, including revenue from on-premise and
cloud-based offerings.

As a public company, Data

3 is always aware of delivering value to shareholders,

and the managed solutions business offers an attractive recurring revenue
model. “Our goal is to balance the delivery of managed solutions to customers
while supporting the on-premise infrastructure solutions when applicable. In the
foreseeable future customers will want a mix of the two, and demand excellence in
both from Data

3,” says Suzanne Carter, General Manager for Data

3’s Managed

Solutions business.

The Data

3 Managed Solutions 250-person team delivers design, implementation,

and management services for customer infrastructures based on the Cisco® Unified
Computing System™ (UCS®) and FlexPod data center platform.

The company has two data centers in Sydney and Brisbane. The data centers
are based on the FlexPod data center platform, which delivers pre-validated,
standardized, scalable building blocks for next-generation data centers. FlexPod
accelerates infrastructure deployment for the Managed Solutions group, while also
reducing risk and cost.

Customer Case Study