Supermarket Giant Achieves Immediate ROI using Cisco MDS 9000 Storage Solution

October 25, 2004

By Stacy Williams, News@Cisco

Ahold USA-the $34 billion owner of Giant, Peapod, Stop & Shop, Tops, and other popular grocery stores-is a blending of six different operating companies, with many of the issues typical of a blended IT infrastructure. Multiple different data centers had embraced a variety of standards over the years, resulting in substantial complexity and costs.

The previous storage-area network (SAN) environment in particular featured multiple low-end switches with thousands of ports located in two main data centers. And for every 12 ports deployed in the previous SAN, three had to be allotted for inter-switch links (ISLs), reducing effective port utilization.

Ahold USA set out to consolidate and simplify its IT infrastructure to maximize efficiency and reduce costs, especially when it came to storage. The company's operations rely on more than 100 terabytes of information, from mission-critical supply chain and financial information to important customer and promotional data.

"Our SAN lacked advanced functionality and features-it simply provided connectivity," explains Chris Collins, manager of infrastructure planning for Ahold USA Information Services. "We were consolidating our data centers and needed more storage because we were bringing applications out of our other data centers."

For this supermarket giant, a Cisco storage solution based on the Cisco MDS 9000 Family of Multilayer Directors and Fabric Switches has resulted in tremendous business benefits, including a huge reduction in storage management complexity and ongoing savings of more than $500,000 per year.

At first glance, Cisco storage solutions seemed too new to the market and networking-oriented for serious consideration. However, after looking at other storage options, Ahold USA became increasingly interested in Cisco storage solutions.

"We were initially hesitant about using Cisco because we saw Cisco as a networking company that didn't know storage," says Collins. "Then we saw all the benefits that Cisco networking technologies brought to the storage environment. Now we look at the storage vendors and ask what they know about networking."

The Cisco MDS 9000 family offered several innovative features attractive to Ahold USA such as support for Virtual SANs (VSANs), enabling more efficient SAN utilization by creating hardware-based, isolated environments within a single SAN fabric. Each VSAN can be zoned as a typical SAN and maintains its own services for scalability and resilience. Using VSANs, Ahold USA can standardize its entire storage infrastructure on a common platform and share resources as necessary.

The Cisco MDS 9000 family also offered integrated Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) support. Using FCIP, each port can be programmed to replicate data from one data center to another, enabling Ahold USA to efficiently replicate critical data over distances for disaster recovery. The company previously outsourced disaster recovery, a high cost proposition that left the company replicating only the most mission-critical data.

According to Collins, the Cisco MDS 9000 deployment went smoothly. The project encompassed 450 Intel-based and 550 Unix servers and replaced a total of 80 switches and 1340 ports across two data centers. "We didn't have a single system that didn't come back up, and we didn't miss any data or applications," says Collins.

Today, Ahold USA has two redundant fabrics at each data center, with Cisco MDS 9509 director switches in the core and MDS 9100 and 9216 fabric switches in the edges to handle 105 terabytes of data. Each director switch features an IP (Internet Protocol) Services Module for disaster recovery services between two data centers.

Few projects provide return on investment (ROI) as immediate and substantial as what Ahold USA has achieved with the Cisco MDS 9000-based solution. Use of ports for inter-switch links immediately dropped from three for every 12 ports to one for every 12 ports, resulting in cost savings of $150,000 per year in ISL costs alone.

In addition, by owning and managing its own disaster recovery network, Ahold USA is saving at least $430,000 each year. Disaster recovery is now simple and highly affordable. To replicate new data, Ahold USA simply has to purchase more storage, making it possible to replicate important customer and promotional information.

"We had a positive ROI by using Cisco from day one," says Collins. "That doesn't happen very much in IT."

Best of all, Ahold USA now has a SAN switch environment that is more flexible and cost-effective, offering many of the advanced features of IP-based networks. The company is considering switch-based virtualization software that can facilitate online storage management, improve disk utilization and reduce storage-related downtime. Plans also include bringing mainframe applications and data onto the Cisco storage infrastructure and separating mainframe from other traffic using VSANs.

"It was a very difficult decision to migrate from one SAN switch environment to Cisco because of the nature and scope of the project," says Collins. "However, with effective planning and the constant support of Cisco systems engineers, the project was more than worth it. We'd do it again."

Stacy Williams is a freelance journalist located in Phippsburg, CO.