Zurich-Wallisellen, Switzerland, February 16, 2012 – The Dolder Grand, a luxury hotel in Zurich, has deployed a new IT solution from Cisco that replaces 40 physical servers with six Cisco UCS™ blade servers. In combination with virtualization solutions from VMware and storage systems from NetApp, the blades help ensure maximum network operating stability. The three vendors, which have been working together closely since early 2010, offer comprehensive solutions for cloud-based data centers, complete with service and support, all from a single source.

Reliability and central control

With the Cisco solution, the Dolder Grand has a highly reliable IT infrastructure that can be managed centrally. The solution, which the hotel says was exceptionally quick to deploy, offers the following advantages:

• Easier data center management
• Lower power consumption and operating costs
• Faster troubleshooting, without downtime
• The ability for IT requests to be handled remotely

Improvements for hotel guests and staff

Poor data center performance and the lack of storage capacity prompted the decision to renew the Dolder Grand's IT infrastructure, originally deployed in 2008, after just three years. The new solution supplied by Cisco not only makes life easier for the luxury hotel's IT department on a day-to-day basis but also enhances convenience for hotel staff and guests:

• Staff are now able to allocate rooms and accept reservations around the clock and can handle check-in and check-out processes more efficiently.
• Guests are able to adjust the lighting and temperature in rooms easily using central controls.
• IT staff no longer need to actively manage and maintain blade servers.

"The hardware does exactly what it should: it simply works. With Cisco UCS servers, we have a stable platform capable of supporting all our applications. The business applications are now provisioned on a virtual basis, which has greatly improved both performance and availability," said Patrick Stäheli, Director of Engineering at the Dolder Grand in Zurich.

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