Информационное Руководство для Cisco Cisco Nexus 2224TP GE Fabric Extender

Alfons Carlebur
Senior Project Adviser
ICT Institute
Rotterdam Services

Customer Case Study

Cisco offered Rotterdam a FlexPod solution based on eight Cisco® UCS B200

M2 Blade Servers and a Cisco UCS 6120XP 20-port Fabric Interconnect on a

three-month try-and-buy basis. Within five months, the decision was made to

standardize on FlexPod. Besides the try-and-buy equipment, which Rotterdam

retained, the Institute has purchased eight additional UCS B200 M2 and 112 UCS

B200 M3 Blade Servers across its two data centers.
The whole server estate will be gradually migrated to FlexPod as the previous

servers reach end-of-life, with Dutch systems integrator, Centric, taking care of

deployment. The Cisco UCS B200 M2 Blade Servers use Intel® Xeon® 5600 series

multicore processors to adjust server performance according to application needs,

while the B200 M3 Blade Servers harness the power of the Intel Xeon E5-2600

processor product family.
Rotterdam’s two data centers have an active-active configuration for disaster

recovery. The Cisco infrastructure features two types of fabric interconnect: 6120

Series for testing and development, and 6248 Series for production environments.

It also includes Nexus® 5596UP and Catalyst® 6500 Series Switches along

with Nexus 2248TP Fabric Extenders connecting the blades remaining from

the previous vendor.
Finally, Rotterdam uses Cisco MDS 9500 Series Multilayer Directors for SAN

switching and Citrix XenApp and VMware for virtualization. Although a few

web-based services are aimed at citizens, most of the applications hosted in

the data center are for Rotterdam government employees and are concerned

with processes as diverse as taxation and traffic management, delivered using

Windows Server 2003 OS.

Results

Rotterdam estimates that tighter integration and greater server utilization could lower

IT investments in 2012 by as much as €800,000. IT spend was cut by €165,000 in

2012. Maintenance costs are also expected to reduce by €105,000 over the next

three years.
In addition to reduced capital expenditure and improved return on investment,

Rotterdam is enjoying a number of other advantages. One of those is reduced

administration effort. “FlexPod makes it easy to add servers,” Carlebur says. “In the

past we’ve had all kinds of migrations, and the effort was huge. But we’ve saved

a lot of time by using UCS, because we did not have to get infrastructure teams

involved in growing the environment.”
Provisioning times have been cut from days to hours. It is estimated that deploying a

new enclosure using the old server system used to take a whole day, simply because

of the amount of cabling required. This time cost has been practically eradicated with

Cisco UCS. Similarly, all the blade drivers required by UCS are already on the FlexPod

system, which makes blade deployment as good as plug and-play. Previously

a technician had to make sure the right drivers were loaded to be sure a server

would work.
A further improvement is enhanced ability to handle problems created by some

of the older applications. These caused memory leakage, which required a Citrix

shutdown and reboot on a regular basis. To minimize downtime, the city had

traditionally restarted several servers simultaneously from a single stored golden

image, but the interfaces on its previous server platforms limited the number

of copies that could be generated at the same time. With Cisco UCS FlexPod,

however, the city can now restart up to 16 servers simultaneously, in the process

saving an estimated four man-hours per week.
The FlexPod architecture is helping Rotterdam to be more energy efficient. Its

superior performance will also allow the government to launch new applications,

such as virtualized AutoCAD computer-aided design packages, which were not

possible before. But perhaps the main benefit is that Rotterdam now has a flexible

and efficient data center infrastructure that will allow the city to remain at the

forefront of global logistics for the foreseeable future.

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