News Release

Slumberland, Inc. Selects Cisco Unified Computing System to Support Private Cloud for Desktop Virtualization and Business Applications

Slumberland Saved $368,000 in Capital Costs and Dramatically Reduced Management Costs
cisco_building_corporate_002-jpg-1889882-1-0
Oct 13, 2010

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Oct. 13, 2010 - Slumberland, Inc., a home furnishings retailer with stores throughout the Midwest has selected Cisco Unified Computing System® as a highly-scalable, cost-effective platform for its primary data center. With 118 retail stores spanning 11 states and online web purchases, the company must track a complex set of factors such as inventory, buying trends, supply chain, and geographic demand. To reduce costs and increase performance for both employees and business partners, Slumberland deployed the Unified Computing System and virtualization to create a private cloud.  The cloud, which supports a virtual desktop environment using Microsoft Terminal Services, improves system performance, which is key because if the system is slow, employees have to wait longer to get credit approval for Slumberland customers and check inventory for merchandise availability, while partners have to wait longer to access business information.

Slumberland engaged Cisco Advanced Services to help determine the best design and integration options for optimal performance, enabling the company to save $368,000 in capital costs compared to the cost of upgrading its legacy platform, and reduce per-server management costs from $1575 to $80.  Slumberland also improved the end user experience with a five-times improvement in user logon time and an eight-times improvement in each user session performance, which means employees and partners experience faster and more responsive access to business data.  In addition, the Unified Computing System is more efficient, delivering a four-times improvement in virtual desktop user sessions, with 160 sessions per server (compared to 40 on its previous legacy system.)

KEY FACTS / HIGHLIGHTS

  • Founded in 1967, Slumberland has 118 stores in 11 states and is one of America's top 25 furniture retail stores.  The Cisco Unified Computing System is integrated with Slumberland's existing Microsoft Hyper-V 2008 R2 virtualized environment, and hosts Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Terminal Services for virtualized desktops, and several operating systems, including Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and 2008 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Slumberland uses Cisco UCS Manager to gain a system-wide view and single control point to dramatically reduce system maintenance time and cost. 
  • The Cisco Unified Computing System enables Slumberland to achieve: 
    • Lower Capital Costs: Slumberland calculates that using Cisco Unified Computing System has helped the company save over $368,000 in capital costs alone. Slumberland is also saving on network connectivity. Two pairs of Cisco 6100 Fabric Interconnects provide connectivity for all chassis and blades in the Cisco Unified Computing System, which enabled the company to consolidate from a 144-port switch to a pair of 20-port Cisco Catalyst® 4900 Switches.
    • Lower IT Staffing Costs: Slumberland is managing 120 servers with only two system administrators, who have reduced the time for provisioning and managing physical servers each week from 16 hours to just six, using the Cisco Unified Computing System, which equates to $45,000 in annual cost savings.
    • Faster Provisioning: With Slumberland's previous computing system, the IT department had to configure network connectivity, storage access, and out-of-band management for each chassis. With the Cisco Unified Computing System, IT performed that configuration just once.
    • Higher Performance: Supporting up to 150,000 input and output operations per second (IOPS), the Cisco UCS Virtual Interface Card, a 10GE Converged Network Adapter, meets Slumberland's demanding I/O requirements. The Cisco UCS B200M blades also deliver faster application performance than other servers with 96 GB of memory.
    • Enables Greater Process Efficiency: Slumberland actively searches for new ways to make IT and operational processes more efficient. Cisco Unified Computing System helps to enable IT innovation by allowing rapid provisioning of new logical and physical servers for development and quality assurance.
  •  In the future, Slumberland plans to deploy the Cisco Unified Computing System in a second data center for disaster recovery, and will use Cisco service profiles to automate server configuration for that data center.

SUPPORTING QUOTES

  • "Furniture retail is a highly competitive commercial environment, and in order to stay ahead of the game we have to continually cut costs while increasing operational efficiency and most important: improving the customer experience," said Jamie Page, CIO at Slumberland. "Cisco UCS saved us over $368,000 in capital costs, dramatically reduced the time needed to provision and manage our infrastructure, and helped us to create an agile, responsive environment that better supports our end users and our business. For us, there are no IT challenges, only business challenges, and Cisco UCS is helping us address those head-on."
  • "Because Cisco's Unified Computing System was purposefully designed to optimize virtualized environments and integrate computing, networking, virtualization and storage access, customers like Slumberland have been able to realize significant cost reductions and efficiencies," said Soni Jiandani, VP in Cisco's Server Access and Virtualization Group. "Our solutions have helped Slumberland transform their data center into an infrastructure that adapts quickly to changing business requirements. We look forward to our continued partnership with Slumberland as they adopt this same cost-effective, flexible infrastructure in their secondary data center."

SUPPORTING RESOURCES

Technorati Tags:

Cisco, Data Center, Data Center Switches, Unified Computing System