MILAN, Italy, February 4, 2004 - Cisco Systems today announced that Unicredito, the largest banking group in Italy in terms of market capitalization, has selected the Cisco MDS 9000 Series of Multilayer Intelligent directors and IP Storage Services Module as part of a project to extend its business continuity strategy using Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) network technology. In doing so, Unicredito is one of the principal financial institutions in Italy aiming to comply with the Basel II recommendations for business continuity.

Under the first phase of the project, Unicredito has interconnected its different data centres using Cisco Catalyst® 6500 series switches and a 10 Gigabit Ethernet wide area link helping to enable high-volume asynchronous data replication over distances of up to 180 kilometres. The Cisco MDS 9000 technology will help enable Unicredito to encapsulate Fibre Channel traffic, using FCIP connectivity from its Cisco MDS 9000-based SAN infrastructure, and transport it over an IP network to remote SAN data centres. Unicredito is also using its existing LAN infrastructure from Cisco to investigate a voice over IP deployment.

"Given the strong Cisco skills heritage here at Unicredito, we decided to begin rolling out our implementation once Cisco had proved that high performance data replication was possible over these distances," said Ing. Fabio Arduini, Business Continuity Director at Unicredit Servizi Informativi. "We also saw the benefits of using our existing Cisco IP network infrastructure to the full by deploying voice, data and now storage over one converged network."

For Unicredito, the new implementation will help to further ensure the high availability and back-up of business-critical data. The Cisco technology was selected following a demanding proof of concept, simulation and test phase which demonstrated that data from Unicredito's storage environment could be mirrored asynchronously over distances of up to 180 kilometres.

"Unicredito has managed to upgrade connectivity between its campus sites whilst at the same time taking advantage of its IP infrastructure to help ensure continuity of operations. In doing so, it has helped to underline its position as one of Italy's most forward-thinking financial institutions," commented Marcus Chambers, operations director, storage networking at Cisco EMEA. "As the Basel II initiative becomes more defined, an increasing number of financial institutions are realising that IP represents a cost-effective way to help ensure business resilience as well as comply with the Basel II guidelines."

As well as bolstering its data availability and disaster recovery capabilities, the technology will help enable Unicredito to transport high volumes of storage and LAN traffic over a single converged wide area network using IP. Quality of Service (QoS) features in IP help to ensure that the performance of one virtual network remains unaffected by the other.

In addition to Cisco this SAN extension project, Unicredito has also deployed a Cisco LAN switching architecture based on Catalyst 6500 Series switches with 10 Gigabit Ethernet modules is also investigating voice over IP services to employees using Cisco Call Manager, and Cisco IP phones, as part of its overall move to convergence.

For more information on Cisco storage networking products, please visit: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/ps4159/index.html

About Unicredit Servizi Informativi

UniCredit Servizi Informativi (USI) is a company controlled by UniCredito Italiano Group. Its mission is to assure the Informative and Organizational System, in terms of effectiveness and commercial innovation, internal cheapness, cheapness of banking managed processes, service quality to end user.

USI has 1080 employees settled in 6 operating sites. At the beginning, each site managed a complete Data Processing System. Today each site has a expertise centre specialized in one or more areas of the Data Processing System whose production indicators are:

• 25.000 Mips of processing capacity
• 92 terabyte of managed information
• 34 million daily transactions.