GARTNER IT EXPO, Cannes, & Budapest, Hungary, November 7, 2005 - Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO), announced today that its optical and storage area networking (SAN) technologies will help Allianz Hungary extend its business continuity infrastructure, reduce operational risk and address industry compliance guidelines.
Allianz, Hungary's largest insurance company with three million customers, estimates it will save more than $100,000 a year by deploying the Cisco technology instead of employing multiple links to connect two data centres located 14kms apart in Budapest. The Cisco optical networking technology will help support the back up information between the data centres and consolidate multiple traffic channels onto one optical network.
"Cisco provides a scalable and cost effective solution that protects our investment, where other technologies can cost up to three times as much. We see Cisco's solution as highly innovative and is driving the standards in optical network solutions," said József Szabó, head of communications and PCs, at Hungary Computing Ltd, the IT arm of Allianz Hungary. "Cisco technology is a key element in Allianz's new business continuity plan to help us deliver data integrity and security, as well as help ensure that critical day-to-day business operations can continue."
The intelligent network will help Allianz form the foundation of a Cisco Data Centre Network Architecture to support current and future data storage needs in an evolutionary way, as well as provide a virtualised environment to share computing and data resources. Since 2000, data storage at Allianz has increased from 4 Terabytes to 40 Terabytes currently.
Allianz's business continuity strategy - based around its two Budapest locations and central SAN - has been developed using Cisco technology. Since all business data is held at the data centres, Allianz needed a highly secure and reliable way to back up and store data, share it between locations, and provide agents and 3000 staff at 140 branch offices around Hungary with a disaster tolerant IT infrastructure.
"Business continuance remains a primary concern for European financial institutions like Allianz, because it helps ensure critical day-to-day business operations are available in the event of a natural disaster, hardware malfunction or application failure," said Kaan Terzioglu, managing director, Central and Eastern Europe for Cisco Systems. "The intelligent networking capabilities in Cisco's optical and storage area networking solutions provide an effective way to meet the demanding availability, capacity, cost and distance requirements of business continuance objectives."
Allianz is deploying Cisco ONS 15540 dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) Extended Services optical transport platforms to provide very high capacity fully redundant interconnection between the primary and backup data centres. Allianz uses Cisco MDS 9216 fabric switches as the foundation of its FICON infrastructure.
