Madrid, 18 March, 2013. - The IE Business School has chosen the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server platform for the update of its Data Processing Centre (DPC) in Madrid. The renovation has enabled IE to consolidate and virtualise their servers, unify local and storage networks, and greatly simplify the administration, resulting in important cost and time savings for improving their day-to-day operations and deploying new services and applications.

IE Business School is an international business school dedicated to training the business elite with a global focus, entrepreneurial character and humanistic spirit. A business school at the top of the European rankings, according to the Financial Times and Businessweek, the faculty is made up of more than 500 lecturers who give classes to students from more than 90 countries studying for university degrees, Masters, PhDs and executive training programmes.

Due to its growth and international renown, the school decided to update its technological infrastructure by adopting a next-generation data centre to enable greater efficiency in meeting the needs of business.

Key points of the announcement

• Unified next-generation platform. After evaluating various proposals, IE selected the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) servers, which allow computing, networks, storage access and virtualisation to be unified into a single integrated architecture. The company has installed eight UCS B200 blade servers in a single chassis equipped with Unified Fabric technology, reducing the wiring and number of components by more than 50% and unifying the local network and storage transport (SAN and LAN) on the FCoE Protocol (Fibre Channel over Ethernet).

• Virtualisation, storage, and management. The architecture is completed with VMware virtualisation software and Hitachi storage arrays which, together with the unified management provided by the Cisco UCS Manager, give IE rapid deployment of more than 100 virtual machines.

• High density wireless network. The IE Business School has also trusted in Cisco to build a high density wireless network on its Madrid campus, comprising around two hundred 802.11n Access Points with Cisco CleanAir technology to avoid wireless interference and offering service to 3,000 concurrent users.

• Application optimisation. All these solutions help the IE Business School simplify and centralise its management, optimise the performance of business-critical applications and support the exponential growth in user numbers and high-performance applications that require greater network capacity both now and in the future, including virtual campus, voice over IP, high-definition video conferencing, e-learning, digital library, virtual desktop and SAN storage networks.

• Complete cycle of services. Anadat Consulting, a Cisco Premier Partner, has undertaken a complete cycle of consulting, engineering, testing, implementation and support services on the Cisco UCS servers.

Supporting quotes:

• Carlos González Jiménez, Operations Director at the IE Business school:

"Although cost reduction and increased scalability were fundamental in the updating of our DPC, Cisco's ability to unify all the data centre infrastructure from start to finish was the most significant factor. Our administration is now simple and uniform and also allows us to devote more time to business-critical applications."

• Ángel Javier Ripa, System Administrator at the IE Business school:

"After trusting Cisco to deploy the entire communications infrastructure including the electronic network, IP telephony and wireless network, we also decided to go for the Cisco UCS integrated architecture. The installation of the equipment and the virtualisation and application migration took around two months, but in just two weeks the server platform was already in production, fully meeting the objectives outlined in the project."

• Luis Palacios, Data Centre and Virtualisation Manager at Cisco Spain:

"We are delighted that an international institution as prestigious as the IE Business School is choosing the advantages of the unified computing provided by Cisco UCS servers. Launched in 2009, this innovative platform has already become the second most globally important blade server by market share. It has more than 30.000 unique clients around the world and more than 70 international performance awards."

Supporting resources

• More information on Cisco Data Centre solutions.
• More information on Cisco UCS.
• More information on Cisco Enterprise Networks architecture.
• Cisco news RSS Feed.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected. For ongoing news, please go to http://thenetwork.cisco.com and http://newsroom.cisco.com/emearnetwork/