HELSINKI, Finland, April 20, 2006 - Cisco Systems today announced that Sanoma Data, the IT provider arm of leading Finnish and International publishing company Sanoma Corporation, is extending its business continuity infrastructure to reduce operational risk, virtualize network resources and consolidate existing storage needs. HP and Cisco have worked together to help ensure seamless solutions though the development of a joint data replication solution, which is being deployed at Sanoma Corporation.
The Finnish company has extended its existing redundant storage area network infrastructure at its headquarter site in Helsinki by linking its remote data center using Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol (FCIP) available on Cisco MDS 9216i Fabric Switches. The existing Gigabit Ethernet connection is shared between normal data and storage traffic.
With the growing volumes of data generated by a need to open up archive access to print and online newspapers, Sanoma Data needed to implement a data centre network architecture that would help ensure data is effectively replicated across two data centre sites to provide mirrored copies for business continuity.
Sanoma Data's existing data centers are already served by a Gigabit Ethernet backbone which is being used to deploy high throughput intersite connectivity and consolidate LAN traffic. By combining LAN and SAN traffic between these sites as well as using FCIP, Sanoma Data aims to reduce costs and improve WAN resilience further.
"The Cisco / HP Data Replication Solution helps providing our customers with more flexible access to our extensive archives of news and other material, which helps us to speed up our news production process significantly as well as provide more informed coverage," commented Pasi Louko, systems specialist of Sanoma Data. "As the content we produce is our key asset, we need to ensure that we can continue operations in the case of data loss at one site. Taking advantage of the combination of intelligent IP and Fibre Channel technologies from Cisco is helping us to deliver a fully redundant virtualized solution in a cost-effective way."
By consolidating existing storage infrastructures onto Sanoma Data's Cisco-based intelligent SAN infrastructure, Sanoma Data was able to achieve better data availability, better storage utilization and the possibility of achieving cost savings. The virtualized approach in the SAN infrastructure coupled with integrated security is helping Sanoma Data to logically separate different business functions onto one physical infrastructure.
"A growing number of media companies in Europe are taking advantage of IP technologies to help them respond faster to breaking news as well as increase the productivity of editorial and production staff," commented Phil Andrews, operations director, Data Center, for Cisco Systems in European and Emerging Markets. "Many media organizations have already invested in fibre channel technologies extensively. For this reason, a multiprotocol solution that helps allow existing SAN infrastructures to be consolidated, as well as providing a way to take advantage of the cost efficiencies of IP, can help reduce operational costs significantly."
Sanoma Data is deploying a data replication solution from Cisco and HP combining Cisco MDS 9216i Fabric Switches, as well as HP EVA storage and Continuous Access replication software. Sanoma Data is also implementing Cisco Catalyst 6500 series switches with Content Switching Modules and integrated SSL offload to support server load balancing across the data centre environment, as well as supporting Gigabit speed data centre interconnection.
