Switzerland, August 10th 2012 – An increasing number of companies are turning to Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) servers. Launched two years ago, Cisco UCS now has more than 11,000 customers worldwide. At the end of last year, Cisco secured Kreuzlingen-based photography and print service provider ifolor as its 100th UCS customer in Switzerland and named the University of Bern as its 150th UCS customer soon afterward, at the beginning of March this year. Since then, the total number of Cisco UCS customers in Switzerland has reached more than 200.
University of Bern benefits from centralized management
The University of Bern relies on Cisco UCS servers to handle rapidly growing data volumes. The servers were installed within three days, with assistance from Netcloud, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, and offer the following advantages:
- Quick installation and intuitive control with no training costs
- Optimized operating costs due to simplified administration
- Scientific projects accelerated through centralized management
Using Cisco UCS, 124 virtual machines on six physical servers store data from the university's 40 institutes and research groups. The virtual machines provide 18 terabytes (TB) of storage space and 1.5 TB of memory. All of the system's components are coordinated with virtualization solutions from VMware and storage from Hitachi Data Systems. Simon Stähelin, virtualization manager at the University of Bern, praises the solution: "System operation is absolutely reliable, and it runs faster than our previous solutions. We're particularly impressed with the centralized management, which significantly simplifies administration."
ifolor handles large volumes of data with Cisco UCS
Customers of ifolor AG deliver the majority of their photos in digital format, which results in large and highly fluctuating volumes of data. Thanks to the Cisco solution, ifolor now has an efficient and stable infrastructure offering the following benefits:
- Flexible capacity scaling for seasonal peaks
- Online ordering services available at all times
- Images processed and stored quickly
ifolor utilizes two redundant Cisco UCS domains in two separate data centers. Each domain contains six Cisco UCS B230 M2 Blade servers with a total of 24 CPUs. The Cisco UCS servers enable the maximum possible stability for the network. Together with storage and data management from NetApp and virtualization solutions from VMware, they make up the FlexPod data center solution. The solution impressed Patrick Sontheim, head of infrastructure at ifolor AG: "The FlexPod architecture provides top performance and scaling with simple management. It allows images to be processed and stored quickly, and the online ordering service is available at all times," Christian Kupferschmid, CIO at ifolor, remarks and adds: "There were no problems with integration and we are still very satisfied with our decision for CISCO UCS."
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