Mexico City, 9 April, 2013 - For the evolution of its data center, Interceramic has chosen the Cisco® data center architecture to manage its worldwide mission-critical applications. Interceramic, a leading ceramic Mexican tile manufacturer with operations in six countries, created an initiative to evolve its main data center platform by adopting the proven Cisco data center architecture based on the Cisco Unified Computing System™ (Cisco UCS®) with stateless computing and unified fabric.
With Cisco’s UCS-based architecture, Interceramic significantly improved business application performance, reduced backup and maintenance times, decreased energy costs by 20 percent, and reduced the physical space needed by servers in the data center by 43 percent.
The innovations in the Interceramic data center significantly lowered the overall costs and support uncertainty associated with renewing, expanding and maintaining the incumbent traditional mission-critical infrastructure based on the RISC platform. The company did a detailed evaluation process with several vendors and selected Cisco’s leaner, high-performing, standards-based Intel x86 architecture, in order to move forward with both bare metal and virtualized workloads.
Interceramic stated that after the deployment, the application response times of the in-house enterprise resource planning (ERP) application noticeably improved, as well as the performance of the commercial applications, such as the Oracle RAC database, showing additional efficiencies with timesaving ratios varying from 3:1 to 6:1. In addition, the network capability to intelligently handle both the data center and campus traffic has proven itself from day one, providing a solid core for Interceramic’s converged communications.
Cisco UCS required only 18 racks, enabling Interceramic to realize a 43% physical space reduction and to avoid the need to adjust rack space requirements for future deployments. Also, when the implementation took place in April 2012 a significant decrease of 20% in energy consumption has been registered.
The platform migration, data, and application took place in just 8 hours without service disruption, a deployment completed after 3 months of planning.
The Interceramic data center is equipped with Cisco UCS B-Series servers consisting of B200 and B230 blades with high-performing Intel x86 CPUs on these two socket systems, in addition to the Cisco UCS C-Series rack-mount C210 servers. The Cisco Nexus® 7010 data center class switch as core, Nexus® 1000V virtual switching, and Cisco MDS 9148 SAN switches replaced the siloed traditional fibre channel switches.
For firmware maintenance tasks, using Cisco UCS, Interceramic went from an average of 12 hours downtime to just one hour or less obtaining a continuous service without disruption. Also the combination of UCS servers and EMC storage has reduced backup time from eight hours to 45 minutes; database cloning from eight hours to three hours, and database snapshots in just 30 minutes.
These activities are done under daily basis after working hours to back up the information managed during the day.
Cisco UCS, now in use by more than 20,000 customers worldwide, delivers innovative data center architecture with computation, network, storage access, and virtualization resources integrated in a single cohesive system that reduces total overall cost, simplifies management, and increases data center agility.
Taking a “clean slate” architectural approach, the Cisco UCS is a scalable, modular architecture, built with cloud computing in mind that is managed as a single cohesive system. UCS components are integrated into a single system that can connect to any network and any storage network.
Cisco Advanced Services and Connext, a Cisco Gold Certified Partner, were in charge of the implementation.
Cisco UCS Facts
Since it was first introduced four years ago, UCS has become highly successful with companies because it delivers superior customers benefits.
UCS achievements since 2009:
- 20,000 UCS customers worldwide
- #3 world market share in x86 blade servers
- Over 2,700 UCS channel partners
- Ten of thousands of supported applications
- 70 world record performance benchmarks to date
- 44 independent software vendors (ISVs) writing applications that take advantage of the UCS application programming Interface (API)
- ISV partner ecosystem
Independent software vendors are developing to the open Cisco UCS application programming interface (API), with over 10,000 applications supported today. UCS is an ideal platform for agile, on-demand delivery of IT resources: The UCS API enables cloud management software to quickly reconfigure computation, network, and storage access functions as business needs change.
- Cisco Unified Computing System supports green data centers and energy efficiency
IT managers can achieve more energy-efficient data centers with the Cisco Unified Computing System – it uses one-half the components and requires less cabling and power/cooling than legacy servers. Over 30 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year could be saved by replacing aging traditional servers and support infrastructure through unified computing and virtualization in the data center. This equals the energy output of 15 U.S. coal-fired electric plants and 35 million tons of C02.
About Interceramic
Interceramic began operations in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1979 as a ceramic tile manufacturing company with the most innovative technology at the time. Today it is one of the largest ceramic tile manufacturers in North America with a total production capacity of approximately 450 million sq ft per year in nine facilities housed in four different manufacturing complexes: three in Chihuahua, Mexico and one in Garland, TX in the US.
With more than 30 years in the market, Interceramic has become a leader not only as a manufacturer, but also as distributor of ceramic tile, bathroom fixtures, setting materials and natural stone.
Interceramic goes to the North American market through a unique franchised-store distribution system in Mexico with 242 stores and 14 wholesale showroom and warehouse facilities plus 55 independent distributors in the US and Canada, also two stores with distribution center in Central America, one in Panama and the other in Guatemala, annual sales nearing the $500 million mark.
About Connext by Migesa
Migesa is one of Mexico's largest service and solutions integrators, offering complete information technology solutions, ranging from security and Internet to data management, operative environments and business continuity. For 30 years, Migesa has assisted mid-sized businesses to the large enterprise, solving business challenges.
ConNext by Migesa is Cisco Gold Partner and Cloud Builder, the highest level of association with the company number one in data communications, also is partner of EMC2, VMware and VCE to provide a state-of-the-art architecture in Datacenter and Cloud solutions; our company has a team of certified experts in different varied disciplines with wide expertise in Communications and Datacenter solutions.
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